An Experimental Study of the Effective Ness of Oral
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
This dissertation has been 64—7017 microfilmed exactly as received GRUNER, Charles Ralph, 1931- AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECTIVE NESS OF ORAL SATIRE IN MODIFYING ATTITUDE. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1963 Speech—Theater University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ORAL SATIRE IN MODIFYING ATTITUDE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Charles Ralph Gruner B*S«£ Me So UUUUM The Ohio State University 1963 Approved by LtvrVM. S).sf Sr-y.+j't' Adviser Department of Speech TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES......................... iii Chapter I. THE PROBLEM........ ... ............... '1 II. EXPERIMENTALP R O C E D U R E ® . o . ...... 29 III. RESULTS............................... $!+ IF. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH................ 66 APPENDIX...................... 77 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................... 119 AUTOBIOGRAPHY.......................... 12$ ii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Rankings of Wine Items by 26 Subjects as Denotations of Perceived Funniness. ...................... h2 2. Rankings of Wine Items by 5k Subjects as Denotations of Perceived Funniness........................... h3 3. Groups Used, Classified by Time, Instructor, Room Letter, Experimental-or-Control Status, and X-Y Classification.................................. U6 1;. Mean Attitude Scale Scores for Experimental Subjects Grouped According to Original Position............ 56 5. Mean Attitude Scale Scores for Control Subjects Grouped According to Original Position............ $6 6. Mean Attitude Scale Scores for Male Experimental Subjects Grouped According to Original Position 57 7. Mean Attitude Scale Scores for Male Control Subjects Grouped According to Original Position............ 58 8. Mean Attitude Scale Scores for Female Experimental Subjects Grouped According to Original Position 58 9. Mean Attitude Scale Scores for Female Control Subjects Grouped According to Original Position............ 58 10. Mean “Perceived Funniness" Ratings of Experimental Subjects Grouped According to Original Position..... 59 11. Mean "Perceived Intelligence" Ratings of Experimental Subjects Grouped According to Original Position 60 12. Data for Experimental Subjects.......... 102 13. Data for Control Subjects.......... ill iii CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM Introduction Recently Time magazine objected strenuously to a satirical editorial cartoon drawn by Herbert L. Block ("Herblock") and appearing in the Washington Post. Depicted in the cartoon was briefcase-toting conservative Barry Goldwater glowering down at an obviously poor family huddled miserably in a doorway; the caption read, "If you had any gumption at all you'd get up from there and go out and inherit a department store." Said Time; Herblock had "gone too far." What did Time mean by this? Why such a strong objection, since the cartoon did not mean to literally report that Mr. Goldwater regularly, even occasionally, rebukes the poor with this admonition? Did Time want to discredit Herblock for being unsportsmanlike? Did they wish to neutralize any potential enjoyment or political ammunition which liberals or Democrats might pick up from the cartoon? Did they fear that Republicans might be influenced to withhold support for Mr. Goldwater in his conservative endeavors? Did they fear that Mr. Goldwater might be cast in a "Herblock Image" as was Richard Nixon (and which he 1 2 admitted he began the campaign of I960 to refute)? Or, did Time merely feel that Herblock had stepped over the fine line dividing good from bad taste? Time also objected strenuously in its pages when Herblock depicted Richard Uixon with five o'clock shadow, dripping dirt and slime, crawling out from under a rock to begin the presidential election campaign of i960. Again, the questions of "why" are applicable. The question here implied is, "Can persuasive power be attributed to satire?". Experimental evidence on the question is scarce, and opinions vary widely. Definitions of "satire" Definitions of "satire" usually imply some kind of per suasive power, or intent. For instance, Webster's Hew Inter national Dictionary, Unabridged Version, second edition, defines "satire" as: A literary composition holding up human or individual vices or folly or abuses or shortcomings of any kind, to reprobation by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, or other method of intensifying incongruities, usually with an intent to provoke amendment. (Italics the writer' 0 Alternative definitions given are, "The branch of literature ridiculing vice and folly," and "The use of trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm for the purpose of exposing and discrediting vice and folly." 3 Edgar Johnson, editor of a standard anthology of satire,1 devotes most of his introductory chapter to defining and explaining the nature and value of satire. He points out that there are various kinds of satire, but that: No description of satire can hold water unless it takes all the aspects of satire into account....The one ingred ient common to all...from satire in cap-and-bells to satire with a flaming sword, is criticism....But criticism alone is not enough to define satire.... Satire1s criticism must be criticism with a difference....you c^n't satirize innocent weakness, suffering, or misfortune. This criticism can operate in different ways, dependent upon the nature of its object: But satire everywhere attacks evil arrogant and trium phant, pride victorious and riding for a fall. It attacks those conventional respectabilities which are really hidden absurdities or vices blindly accepted by thought lessness, habit, or social custom. It attacks foolishness foolishly convinced that it makes sense, grinning and unrepentant in its folly....The merely foolish, satire may be content to "take down a peg or two"; the dangerous and vicious it would reduce to ruin. But in both the important thing to note is a kind of unmasking. The foolishness shown up is a foolishness that usually passes for sense. The ugliness revealed in its true colors has masqueraded as merit.3 Swabey also feels that satire is intended to have some persuasive effect upon its audience: Closely related to irony is another variety of the comic involving adverse criticism known as satire. To ridi cule the vices and follies of mankind is the business 1Edgar Johnson, A Treasury of Satire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 19U£). ^Ibid., p. 7. ^Ibid., p. 8 . i k of satire.... satire by its imaginative, eloquence excites anger at human misdeeds and cruelties. Highet feels that satire is intended to have persuasive effect but, failing this, is content to give joy to the creator and the audience of the satire, at the expense of its victim: The purpose of invective and lampoon is to destroy an enemy. The purpose of comedy and farce is to cause painless undestructive laughter at human weaknesses and incongruities. The purpose of satire is, through laughter and invective, to cure folly and to punish evil; but if it does not achieve this purpose, it is content to jeer at folly and to expose evil to bitter contempt.-5 Swabey and Highet speak of the subject of satire as being folly, evil, and vice. Johnson further defines what he means by "satire" by elucidating further its subject matter and its treatment at the hands of satire: "The vices that call for the scourge of satire," observes Sylvan Forester in Melincourt, "are those which pervade the whole frame of society, and which, under some specious pretense of private duty, or the sanction of custom and precedent, are almost permitted to assume the semblance of virtue, or at least to pass unstigmatized in the crowd of congenial transgressions." The essential trick of satire is a dextrous stripping away of false fronts. Johnson points out that some satire, like that of the Roman Juvenal, is direct, "strong", a kind of crude name-calling which is not, nor need not, be funny for effectiveness; but that there ^•Marie Collins Swabey, Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 5>9-6b. '’Gilbert Highet, The Anatony of Satire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 1^6.' ^Johnson, og. cit., p. 8 . 5 is a more indirect kind of satire which does intend to be funny as well as serve a more serious purpose: For satiric purposes, however, abuse has to be more than funny, it has to be damaging, and to be damaging it must strike us as really true. The sudden revelation of a damaging truth is what makes comedy wit....When Dorothy Parker, hearing that Coolidge was dead, asked, "How could they tell?" it was the dead-pan inexpressiveness of the living Coolidge that gave her query its wit and made of those four words a ferocious epitaph. The abuse is implied rather than stated, but our imaginations are equal to the task; they expand into the hollow presented to them with the violence of an explosion.V ' It would seem almost self-evident that one kind of satire, the political cartoon, is definitely conceived to be, at least by its creators, persuasive. The late editorial cartoonist Edmund Duffy said that "the best cartoons are against something." It has been said of Duffy's work that, if the pen is really mightier than the sword, Duffy's cartoons are "more effective than well-aimed bricks."^ Writer Kenneth Rexroth has said that, "Great humor has a savagery about it," and "True humor is the most effective mode of courage."9 The attitudes and motivations which satirists,