The use of ‘Comedy’ as a rhetorical device in US president Barak Obama’s speech at White House Correspondents’ Dinner in May, 2014

Abstract

The White House Correspondents' Dinner is an annual meeting where politicians, journalists, TV-stations‟ tycoons, and celebrities meet with the US president and listen to his speech. This year dinner has become too much of a Hollywood spectacle where the commander-in-chief‟s address was loaded with jokes and sarcasm. Comic discourse is rhetorical in nature since it is designed to persuade audience and change their future behavior through manipulating and changing the way they think. As often as not, comedians use ethos „comic authority‟, and kairos „tapering discourse according to the audience‟ to achieve their goals. The comedian‟s humorous message is of twofold. First, striving to solicit audience‟s responses to the invoked reference that is considered shared knowledge between the performer and the audience, and second, initiating the humor. Knowing who the audience is (the majority are actors and actresses), the US president chose to play the role of a stand-up comedian rather than the commander-in-chief and succeeded in drawing a wider attention, managing the situation, and eventually, to effect persuasion. Obama‟s jokes were intrinsic, i.e. they were taken from the immediate American context of culture and context of situation. All in all, he entered into the spirit of acting to align with his audience. By the use of comedy as a rhetorical device, Obama managed to solicit affiliative responses from his audience in a form of laughter and applause. Audience‟s laughter and applause show appreciation of what has just been said and indicate that a close attention is being paid to the talk. Bell (2001) argues that style (the degree of attention speakers pay to their speech when they involve in language interactions) is designed by audience rather than language users, i.e. speakers‟ ways of speaking differ based on the rhetorical pillar that states: „know your audience‟. In other words, speakers alter their speech depending on who their audience is at the moment of speaking. Keywords: persuasion, rhetoric, managing, style, identification, comedy, comedian, ethos, kairos, connection, affiliation, response.