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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

Comedy In Unfunny Times: News Parody And Carnival After 9/11, Paul Achter Jul 2008

Comedy In Unfunny Times: News Parody And Carnival After 9/11, Paul Achter

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Comedy has a special role in helping societies manage crisis moments, and the U.S. media paid considerable attention to the proper role of comedy in public culture after the 9/11 tragedies. As has been well documented, many popular U.S. comic voices were paralyzed in trying to respond to 9/11 or disciplined by audiences when they did. Starting with these obstacles in mind, this essay analyzes early comic responses to 9/11, and particularly those of the print and online news parody The Onion, as an example of how “fake” news discourse could surmount the rhetorical chill that fell over public …


Gloria Steinem, "Testimony Before Senate Hearings On The Equal Rights Amendment" (6 May 1970), Jill M. Weber Jan 2008

Gloria Steinem, "Testimony Before Senate Hearings On The Equal Rights Amendment" (6 May 1970), Jill M. Weber

Communication Studies Faculty Scholarship

In her testimony before the Senate ERA hearings, Gloria Steinem refuted sex‐based myths about women and championed the ERA. Situating the ERA within the larger civil rights movement, Steinem called on Congress to acknowledge women's oppression as a serious political issue. She also worked to make women's rights issues more appealing to a mainstream audience by talking about the ERA's benefits for men and women and by emphasizing the democratic principles it embodied.