Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a podcast for people who enjoy thinking more than shouting and are generally bored with the

red team versus blue team spectacle enthralling the rest of the country.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton and I once found a disposable monocle in my pocket.

Today I'm going to speak with Professor Danigal Goldfwaite Young.

She is the author of Irony fear and laughter in the United States

professor I am really happy to talk to you thank you for having me on

Andrew and you your book occupies this fascinating nexus point for virtually everything I'm interested in.

Because you talk about journalism and you get into like the mechanics of comedy, but also

how that applies to political satire and all these different things.

You can imagine it was hard to figure out how to land on this particular book when each of those topics

could have been a book. So it was just trying to put them all

together I could see that and you you in the intro you kind of like you indicate

to me or it indicates that you were kind of like you had a you had a moment where you were

thinking about either going full-time comedy or going full-time academic and and I

gather you an academic but remain funny I did did. Oh and I also I still perform with comedy sports

Philadelphia once a month. So I've been doing that for 20 years. So I had done

theater sports for four years that's like competitive improv

short form for four years in college and I had done I had started a long form

group up in New Hampshire and then got to Philadelphia and I audition for comedy

sports, got in there, still kept performing.

As I was getting my master's degree and was really torn am I going to continue for the

PhD or am I going to really try my hand at comedy so I ended up doing the

...