{"id":602,"date":"2006-01-27T11:19:51","date_gmt":"2006-01-27T16:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2006\/01\/27\/perspective\/"},"modified":"2006-01-27T11:19:51","modified_gmt":"2006-01-27T16:19:51","slug":"perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/27\/perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dartblog.com\/data\/004847.html\"><img class=\"alignright\" src='http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/uploads\/terrorcartoon.jpg' alt='' \/><\/a>   Political humor is always a tricky business; taking a strong stand tends to annoy more than half of your potential audience rather than make them laugh, while wishy-washy moderation just isn&#8217;t that funny.  This post at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dartblog.com\/data\/004847.html\">Joe&#8217;s Dartblog<\/a> pops open the hood on an editorial cartoon and looks inside, showing something we don&#8217;t usually get to see:  three cartoons about a single topic, by the same artist, taking three different ideological perspectives (left, moderate, right).  Even though I love political humor when it&#8217;s insightful and agrees with my predelictions, this exercise actually highlights the rhetorical limitations of the medium.  A joke isn&#8217;t an argument, and the techniques of humor can be much more directly employed to bolster opinions that people already have than to make them see things in a new way.  (Via the <a href=\"http:\/\/volokh.com\/archives\/archive_2006_01_22-2006_01_28.shtml#1138375489\">Volokh Conspiracy<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Political humor is always a tricky business; taking a strong stand tends to annoy more than half of your potential audience rather than make them laugh, while wishy-washy moderation just isn&#8217;t that funny. This post at Joe&#8217;s Dartblog pops open the hood on an editorial cartoon and looks inside, showing something we don&#8217;t usually get [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}