As increasing economic inequality takes center stage in the American political theater, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have not missed a single beat. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report utilize a unique synthesis of current issues and satire to provide informative and utterly hilarious programs. Unlike mainstream and established American media outlets, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report comically seek to expose the hypocrisy in media and politics, educating the public to see a different perspective- behind the curtain, if you will. Ever since the Occupy movement of 2011, their focus has been slightly narrowed. Chief among their repeated motifs is the ever-expanding gap between rich and the poor, and how our elected officials are rising to confront this issue. Although Stewart and Colbert are often criticized for a liberal bias, they believe that conservative policies and policy makers have an inherent discriminatory policy against the poor. Through sarcasm and humor, Stewart and Colbert both advocate for economic equality by countering the conservative dogma.
Occupy movement, “we are the 99%,” believes that there is an economic inequality between the wealthiest 1% and rest of the population in America. Jessica Williams from The Daily Show agrees and focuses on poverty and hunger in America in “The Real Hunger Games.” Americans suffer the real hunger games as Republicans, as Forbes Magazine columnist John Tammy, want to cut government spending on socially safety networks like Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, SNAP. Tammy believes “food stamps are cruel,” as people are not happy when they are reliant on someone. (Stewart, 2013) Tammy doubts that poverty in the United States is onerous enough to w...
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...ervatives are out of touch. Stewart and Colbert satirize this ubiquitous issue of the dichotomy that exists between the rich and the poor, and the injustices that come with it and the idiocy of those too petty to recognize this fact. Stewart and Colbert encourage the audience to question how we take for granted economic inequality and the discrimination again the poor.
Works Cited
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Colbert, Stephen, prod. dir. "Bug Protein." The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. Colbert Nation, 15 May 2013. Colbert Nation. Comedy, 16 May 2013. Web. 31 Jan. 2014.
Schlesselman, Daric. "The Real Hunger Games." The Daily Show. Prod. Miles Kahn. Dir. John Stewart. Comedy Central. 17 Dec. 2013. Television.
“The O’Reilly Factor” which is aired on the Fox News Channel where he talks about political
"Jim Cramer 14036." The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Comedy Central. 12 Mar. 2009. Television.
America has the highest overall and childhood poverty rate of any major industrialized country on earth. Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year, mostly because they lack health insurance and cannot get beneficial care. From an economic perspective and as the government tries to fight its way out of this terrible recession, it makes no sense that the United States ignores numerous citizens who could be of such great help (Sen. Bernie Sanders). Poverty in America is about a lack of basic necessities and an uncertainty as to where to get food, an uncertainty how to pay your most bills, and it's about a dependence on either imperfect government institutions or overwhelmed private charities. Even though the United States does not have starvation,...
“Fake” news programs, such as The Daily Show, Zinser reasonably argues, have the potential to dilute mass media and deceive viewers. The Daily Show has been straightforward about its lack of legitimacy as a hard hitting news program, but “the show’s content and guest list suggest otherwise” (Zinser 367). Zinser indicates that The Daily Show should hold itself to higher standards because “people might well think they’re being fully or sufficiently informed while watching” (367). In other words, Zinser believes that if viewers tune in with the expectation of becoming informed and The Daily Show’s content consists of significant topics, the creators ...
...visions and relates to us a powerful social evolution based on the ever-widening gap between the majority of the American population (“the 99%”) and the wealthy minority (“the 1%”) (Zinn, p. 619-621, 1995). Zinn’s “prophecy” of a society where the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer” has been attacked time and again by conservatives and others. Considering the events of the last several years, the banking crisis, and the rise of the Occupy Movement in 2011, Zinn’s theories regarding the 99% are amazingly perceptive, even predictive of 21st Century times.
Web. The Web. The Web. 22 Oct. 2013. Skloot, Rebecca.
Parks and Recreation is a political satire sitcom about a Parks and Recreations department in the city of Pawnee, Indiana. Many of the events portrayed in the show are based on real life ones, and the cast has moments where they perform “interviews” with invisible, non-existent cameramen (mockumentary-style). To go along with this show’s style, the focus would be Pokémon Go in 2016. To best understand the relationships between the characters at the stage they would be in this episode, the best episode to watch would be Season 5, episode 9 (Article Two).
In the year 2015, around 40 million U.S. citizens were food insecure (Randall para. 3). Food insecurity can be defined in paragraph 3 by “[having] difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. This 12.7% of American citizens also contains another group - children. Aged 10-17, 6.8 million adolescents struggle with a food insecurity. There have been several years of cuts to the social programs designed to help these people, along with the Great Recession continuing to leave an impact on the U.S. economy (para. 6). Under the Obama administration, $8.6 billion was cut from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as Food Stamps. From 1993-2001 under the Clinton administration, former President Bill Clinton’s administration “gutted the welfare system” (para. 15). Because of these budget cuts, the families who rely on food assistance from the government have been allotted less throughout the years. From a sociological perspective, the concepts of sociological imagination, class stratification, and social location are in effect when it comes to child hunger in the United States. Being hungry is an issue larger than any one individual can control.
Doug O’Brien, director of public policy and research at Chicago-based Second Harvest, says “’we’ve seen a real shift in who we serve. A decade ago, there were almost always homeless, single men and chronic substance abusers. Now we have children and working families at soup kitchens’” (Koch). These families that are feeling the effects of food insecurity will not be the only ones affected by it, but all of America.
Colbert compares himself to a chicken wing through the use of a simile. Colbert says, “ the inter-webs tried to swallow me whole” but “I got lodged in its throat and it hacked me back up like a hastily chewed chicken wing.” This is a hyperbolic comparison because Colbert and the chewed up chicken wing have absolutely nothing in common. A chicken wing is food and Colbert on the other hand is not. Unless, there is some cannibalism involved. Both of these cause uncomfortable situations. Eating something and then chocking on it is very painful. However, cannibalism is just an uncomfortable
Comedian Jon Stewart gives a speech on the Daily Show during the “Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear”. He wants the viewers of the Daily Show to realize the difference between the real and fake threats and to take a humorous perspective on most of America’s “problems”. Stewart also emphasizes to his audience not to take every person on the media by his word and not to overreact to everything they hear. He uses metaphors, comparisons, and hypothetical examples to get his point across.
The issue of income inequality is a crucial piece of your upcoming re-election campaign this fall. Similarly to the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the 1960s, a high level of inequality can hamper social cooperation, encourage intra-elite competition, and ultimately during wartime, as illustrated in the Vietnam War, can further exasperate the American people’s frustrations with income inequality.
The author juxtaposes the rich and poor with those in between in order to convince the audience, the middle class, that they should follow in the footsteps of both those richer and poorer than them in order to cease their materialistic attitudes. Near the end of the essay, Eighner states, “I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy—we both know there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race millions who have confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.” The author is stating that the wealthy and the homeless are both aware that there are things more important in life than tangible objects. Everyone else, however, has not made this connection yet and still searches, meaninglessly, for something of value. The middle class is often known to aspire to...
Horsey’s veracious depiction of the distribution of U.S. wealth constructs a dismal, eye-opening reality as he portrays the uneven proportions of slices that is the U.S. wealth given to the rich, the middle class, and the poor and the added whipped cream called tax cuts presented to the affluent. In his political cartoon, reasonably named “ Dessert, American Style,” he paints the image of an elephant, who represents the Republicans, offering further tax cuts to the wealthy who already have a substantial portion of the U.S. wealth. While the rich are served the majority of the pie, the middle class only receives a single slice and the poor are given mere crumbs. This illustrates how the GOP favors the rich by giving them tax cuts while offering