Seventh-year political science Ph.D. candidate Anthony Anderson is using a mixture of survey results and social media analysis to research the role of humor in American politics. Known to UC San Diego’s political science community as a creative and charismatic instructor, Anderson is both a master of statistical analysis and lover of puns. But his studies into humor go far beyond everyday jokes, revealing broad patterns in the way that politicians interact with the public.
Anderson’s dissertation consists of two parts: finding a way to measure humor itself and analyzing the effectiveness of politicians using humor to respond to political scandals.
“Let’s say a politician got accused of some sort of scandal,” Anderson said in an interview with The UCSD Guardian. “They have a strategic choice where they can … tell a joke, to try either deflecting or trying to appear more relatable. … Most politicians probably wouldn’t want to make that risk, but there are a few rare cases where a politician might make that.”
To measure humor itself, Anderson is using survey website Prolific to offer random pairs of generic written jokes to respondents and ask which joke they find funnier. With about a thousand people surveyed so far and about a thousand more to go, he now has a massive dataset that he is using to place these jokes on a scale from least to most funny. So far, he noted, children’s jokes tend to be the least funny to respondents, while jokes poking fun at universal, everyday experiences tend to be the funniest.
Anderson’s model also allows him to examine partisan divides between the types of jokes that respondents find funny.
“One interesting one is that when you look at this type of unfinished joke, where the joke sort of relies on an irony that’s not actually resolved and up to the reader — that was actually the one joke that had a partisan divergence, where Democrats were much more open to that than Republicans,” he said.
Most jokes Anderson uses in the surveys are generic, pulled from Reader’s Digest or online children’s joke archives. But to examine the way respondents view partisan political jokes, he has gotten a bit more creative.
“I did sneak a few political jokes in there,” he said. “I used what’s called a ladder joke, where I just swap out one word. So, I had a joke that would be something like, ‘What is the most rare creature? An honest politician.’ And then I would … fill it in with either ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat.’ … [Respondents] were much more negative toward the jokes that made fun of them.”
To study politicians’ use of humor in response to political scandals, Anderson analyzes Tweets or X posts surrounding different scandals in American politics. Using a dataset of 300 to 400 scandals in American politics from 2009 to 2021, Anderson collects a given politician’s last 20 posts from before they were involved in a scandal and their first 20 posts after it occurred, using their contents to determine how their use of humor played into public reception of the scandal.
While tests revealed humor was very effective at helping politicians survive scandals, there were some exceptions.
“For those that were kind of funny prior to the scandal, they didn’t do that well, actually,” Anderson said. “There seems to be almost a potential backlash to those that are thought to be funny. … It could potentially be that people look at them as less serious, so when they have a scandal, it sort of reinforces that ‘hey, maybe they shouldn’t be there in the first place.’ Or it could be, if those people for whatever reason are choosing to be serious after, it makes them look a little bit more guilty, because they have a change in their tone.”
One example that has proved especially interesting for this study took place during the 2016 presidential election, when Hillary Clinton and President Donald Trump, who were each involved in separate political scandals, made similar jokes referencing the game Pokémon Go. Anderson is looking into future research that can help determine why Trump’s joke saw more positive public reception than Clinton’s joke.
“Interestingly, that shows that there’s probably some other co-variates that I want to test here,” Anderson said. “I might do some extensions to see whether things like gender [are significant]. … Really, I’d say that’s kind of the next step I’d want to go with with the research, is looking at: What are the other factors that make a joke more effective or not?”
Alongside these future avenues of research, Anderson will soon begin the last step of writing his dissertation: surveying people on their attitudes toward humorous and serious responses to a series of hypothetical political scandals. He hopes doing so will answer his more specific questions about ways the public views different political situations.
“Is there an effect for the actual humorous response?” he said. “And also, how does that interact with the scandal? For example, as the scandal scales up in severity, do we find humor becomes way more risky?”
As he heads into the final year of his Ph.D. program, Anderson plans to serve as a teaching assistant for Revelle College writing courses, continue teaching and assisting instruction for political science courses, and finish his dissertation. He hopes that this work will not only serve as a resource on campaign strategy but help voters navigate politics in the digital age through a more critical lens.
“We realize there’s a lot of entertainment mixed with politics, but are people actually getting away with doing potentially really negative things?” he said. “Hopefully, that sort of insight can help people think through things and also potentially help politicians strategize.”
