“Unfortunately, This Isn’t a Joke”: Crisis Communication and Humour Messaging Strategy on American Late Night Talk Shows
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past 25 years or so, celebrities have appeared on American late night talk shows to respond to social issue crises that threaten their reputations and careers. This study examines 10 celebrity appearances in this comedy genre to better understand how the late night talk show functions discursively in crisis communication with respect to humour messaging strategy. The analysis finds that, rather than using humorous messaging strategies to deal with their crises, TV show hosts and guests downplay humour to project sincerity—even in response to less serious situations. Furthermore, the live studio audience faces scolding for the typical reactions expected of live studio audiences—cheering, clapping, laughing—that may reduce the celebrity’s sincerity. This study argues that these behaviours suggest that humour should be avoided even in less serious reputational crises. Finally, the article speculates why a celebrity would choose a funny television talk show—an unusual venue for crisis communication—to respond to a reputational crisis that is no laughing matter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it