Satire

Human emotions are governed by four homours of Hippocratic medicine-black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. The excess or deficiency of these fluids can affect a person’s temperament and health. Four temperaments is a proto-psychological theory that suggests that there are four fundamental personality types, sanguine (pleasure-seeking and sociable), choleric (ambitious and leader-like), melancholic (analytical and thoughtful), and phlegmatic (relaxed and quiet). Most formulations include the possibility of mixtures of the types. These temparaments are difficult to bridle as the imbalance of any of these can affect human health and emotions. Humour is the tendency of particular cognitive experience to provoke laughter and provide

Both shows courted the genre blending hybridity between satiric comedy and reportage that has now become common place. Both shows were extremely popular and controversial and ended with early cancellation and public debate in their wake. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Rick Mercer Report and Seven Days are a few that became popular. Premiering in 1962 TW3 was one of the most popular and iconoclastic of the group. Satire is closely involved with comedy. The satire that produces no comic reaction may turn out to be an accidental tragedy. Joseph Brooker in his article on “Satire Bust: The Wagers of Money” muses that “What distinguishes satire amid comedy’s broad remit is the intensity of its attention to a subject and the sense that something is at stake beyond sheer laughter. Perhaps comedy can have its own practical aims: one can construct instrumental views of the genre in which laughter is good for spiritual or even physical health, or confirms the benign spread of a comic world-view”

Real and the satiric are interwoven in a tangible way. The ability to manipulate and alienate the real gives the satire a great deal of power and appeal. As Amber Day opines, “One of the primary factors that set these shows apart from other examples of political satire is this weaving of real news footage or the actions of real public figures into the satirist’s narrative” (54). The satiric programmes dissect the politicians and we could see a ‘political autopsy’ which often puts the politicians under tremendous pressure to perform well. Usually people want the satirists ‘to represent’ them and to push their particular worldview into the wider public sphere. In his text The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas talks about the concept of public sphere. Amber Day quotes Habermas who defines the “bourgeois public sphere” as “the sphere of private people who come together as a public” (14). Habermas attributes it development to the 18th C coffee houses of England, France and Germany where people gathered for debate irrespective of their class and social backgrounds of other speakers and concentrated on the relative rationality of the debate. From these coffee houses press came to take on the responsibility and then the audio visual media. My contention is that these programmes even paved the way for the