The Politicisation of the U.S late-night talk show genre in the Trump Threat Era (2015-2021)

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the U.S. late-night talk show (LNTS) genre has been developing in ways that can be understood as politicisation. The Daily Show (TDS) between 1999 and 2015 was a key driver of trends towards more news review, and partisan and satirical comedy, particularly as host Jon Stewart and his fellow ‘correspondents’ responded to the divisive Bush years. Stewart’s format was fundamental in helping to bring comedy with critique to late-night television, representing a break from the past when hosts generally avoided political comedy that may upset segments of their network audiences. Donald Trump’s emergence onto the national political scene from 2015, and the unusual prospect that he posed, presented a new challenge for a new generation of late-night hosts. What discursive forms could they mobilise to deal with the problems of representation that his presence in politics posed? Such questions became increasingly pressing as Trump’s MAGA populist brand appeared to spark one controversy after another. This study analyses LNTS representations of Trump between 2015 and 2021. In this second wave of politicisation, late-night hosts gradually began to make sense of Trump via the frame of ‘threat’, and Trump was increasingly represented as a threat to U.S. democracy. I argue that while partisan satire was directed at the figure of Trump, it also appeared to reach its limits. As the sense of ‘Trump threat’ grew in light of events during the Trump presidency, hosts adopted non-comedic discursive strategies to respond to the dangers of Trumpism that their shows came to center upon. The genre and textual analysis conducted illustrates how the politicisation of the LNTS emerged in a dynamic relationship to Trump threat and populist discourses. The thesis extends our understanding of the distinctive forms news review, analysis, commentary and entertainment can take in contemporary U.S public culture when popular genres change with socio-historical circumstances.