Article published In:
International Journal of Language and CultureVol. 11:1 (2024) ► pp.123–152
Metaphtonymy and semio-cognitive de-legitimation of Donald Trump in the meme discourse of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (January 2016–December 2019)
The current research endeavor extends scholarship on political satire and digital memes proposing a more nuanced
semio-cognitive analytical framework for the innovative political image macro memes pertinent to The Daily Show with
Trevor Noah (January 2016–December 2019). Premised on Martynyuk and Melescchenko’s (2021) conceptualization of
metaphtonymy and van Leeuwen’s
(2007)
(de)-legitimation strategies, a corpus of 159 image macro meme instances from
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s (January 2016 to December 2019) has been examined to show how the
semio-cognitive de-legitimation of Donald Trump and his administration is materialized through creative
meme-inherent metaphtonymies. Key findings include the dominance of four meme-specific metaphtonymic patterns. In tandem, the
overlapping semio-discursive de-legitimation strategies of authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and
mythopoeisis are metaphtonymically encoded in the image macro memes of the show’s monologue to: (a) function
as highly medium-specific expressions that respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates, and (b)
provide a timely (and even reactionary) response to political debates, creating a negative view of Donald Trump to reduce his
legitimacy as the US president.
Keywords: (de)-legitimation strategies, image macro meme, metaphtonymy, semio-cognitive, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Article outline
- Introduction
- The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
- Infotainment, late-night satire and The Daily Show
- Methodology
- Identification of metaphtonymic patterns
- Identification of de-legitimation strategies
- Analysis
- Multimodal metaphtonymy with a simple metaphoric source
- Multimodal metaphtonymy with a metaphoric source structured by simple metonymy
- Multimodal metaphtonymy with a metaphoric source structured by metonymic Chain
- Multimodal metaphtonymy with a metaphoric source structured by radial metonymy
- Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (92)
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed. 2022. “Taboo
Metaphtonymy, Gender, and Impoliteness: How Male and Female Arab Cartoonists Think and
Draw.” Social Semiotics.
Ali, Marwah Kareem, Anne A. Christopher and Munif Z. Nordin. 2016. “Language
Use and De-Legitimation Strategy in Newspaper Discourse: A Critical Discourse
Analysis.” Australian Journal of Basic and Applied
Sciences 10 (12): 318–327.
Anderson, James, and Amie D. Kincaid. 2013. “Media
Subservience and Satirical Subversiveness: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Propaganda Model and the
Paradox of Parody.” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 30 (3): 171–188. 
Baum, Matthew A. 2002. “Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft
News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public.” American Political Science
Review 96 (1): 91–109.
2003a. “Soft News and Political
Knowledge: Evidence of Absence or Absence of Evidence?” Political
Communication 20 (2): 73–190.
2003b. Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion
and American Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2005. “Talking the Vote: Why
Presidential Candidates Hit the Talk Show Circuit.” American Journal of Political
Science 49 (2): 213–234.
Baumgartner, Jody, and Johnathan S. Morris. 2006. “
The
Daily Show Effect.” American Politics
Research 34 (3): 341–367.
Baumgartner, Jody C, Jonathan S Morris, and Jeffrey Michael Coleman. 2018. “Did
the “Road to the White House Run Through” Letterman? Chris Christie, Letterman, and Other-Disparaging versus Self-Deprecating
Humor.” Journal of Political
Marketing 17 (3): 282–300.
Baym, Geoffrey. 2005. “The
Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism.” Political
Communication 22 (3): 259–276.
. 2007. “Representation
and the Politics of Play: Stephen Colbert’s “Better Know a District”.” Political
Communication 24 (4): 359–376.
. 2008. “Serious
comedy: Expanding the boundaries of political discourse, In: Baumgartner JC and Morris JS (eds) Laughing
matters: Humor and American politics in the media age. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 21–38.
. 2010. From
Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Baym, Geoffrey, and Jeffrey P. Jones. 2012. “News
Parody in Global Perspective: Politics, Power, and Resistance.” Popular
Communication 10 (1/2): 2–13.
Becker, Amy B. 2021. “Stephen Colbert takes on
Election 2020: #betterknowaballot, Voter Mobilization, and the Return to Playful Participatory
Satire.” Journal of Information Technology &
Politics 18 (4): 417–429.
Bode, Leticia, and Amy B. Becker. 2018. “Go
Fix it: Comedy as an Agent of Political Activation.” Social Science
Quarterly 99 (5): 1572–1584.
Boukes, Mark. 2019. Agenda-Setting
with Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public, Media, and Political
Agenda. Political
Communication 36 (3): 426–451.
Brugman, Britta C, Christian Burgers, Camiel J. Beukeboom, and Elly A. Konijn. 2021. “From
The Daily Show to Last Week Tonight. A Quantitative Analysis of Discursive Integration
in Satirical Television News.” Journalism
Studies 22 (9): 1181–1199.
Burgers, Christian, Margot van Mulken and Peter Jan Schellens. 2012. “Verbal
Irony: Differences in Usage across Written Genres.” Journal of Language and Social
Psychology 31 (3), 290–310.
Cao, Xiaoxia. 2010. “Hearing
it from Jon Stewart: The Impact of The Daily Show on Public Attentiveness to
Politics.” International Journal of Public Opinion
Research 22 (1): 26–46.
Cheruiyot, David. 2018. “Popular
Criticism That Matters: Journalists’ Perspectives of ‘Quality’ Media Critique.” Journalism
Practice 12 (8): 1008–1018.
Compton, Josh. 2011. “Surveying
Scholarship on The Daily Show and The Colbert
Report
.” In The Stewart/Colbert Effect: Essays on the Real
Impacts of Fake News edited by Amarnath Amarasingam, 9–23. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Curato, Nicole, Marit Hammond and John B Min. 2019. Power
in Deliberative Democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dainas, Ashley R. 2015. “Keep Calm and Study
Memes.” Master of Art Thesis, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, the USA.
Dancygier, Barbara. 2021. “Narrativised
Simile and Emotional Responses to Brexit.” Russian Journal of
Linguistics 25 (3): 663–684.
Džanić, Nihada Delibegovic, and Sanja Berberoviü. 2010. “On
Politicians in Big Women’s Sunglasses Driving Buses with their Feet in Mouths: Late-Night Political Humour and Conceptual
Integration
Theory.” Jezikoslovlje 11 (2): 197–214.
Elyamany, Nashwa. 2023. “How
do you Meme Trump, Noah? Shaping a New Memescape in The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (January 2016 – December
2019)
.” International Journal of Arabic-English
Studies 23 (2): 385–414.
Enli, Gunn, and Linda Therese Rosenberg. 2018. “Trust
in the Age of Social Media: Populist Politicians Seem more Authentic.” Social Media +
Society 1–11.
Faina, Joseph. 2012. “Public
Journalism is a Joke: The Case for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.” Journalism: Theory,
Practice and
Criticism 14 (4): 541–555.
Feldman, Lauren, and Dannagal Goldthwaite Young. 2008. “Late-Night
Comedy as a Gateway to Traditional News: An Analysis of Time Trends in News Attention among Late-Night Comedy Viewers during
the 2004 Presidential Primaries.” Political
Communication 25 (4): 401–422.
Forceville, Charles. 2008. “Metaphor
in Pictures and Multimodal Representations. In The Cambridge Handbook
of Metaphor and Thought.” Gibbs, R. W. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 462–482.
. 2009. “Metonymy
in Visual and Audiovisual Discourse.” In E. Ventola & A. J. Moya Guijarro (Eds.), The
world told and the world shown: Multisemiotic
issues (pp. 56–74). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gal, Noam, Limor Shifman and Zohar Kampf. 2016. ““It
Gets Better”: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity.” New Media &
Society 18 (8): 1698–1714.
Garassino, Davide, Nicola Brocca and Viviana Masia. 2022. “Is
Implicit Communication Quantifiable? A Corpus-Based Analysis of British and Italian Political
Tweets.” Journal of
Pragmatics
194
1: 9–22.
Goossens, Louis. 1990. “Metaphtonymy:
The Interaction of Metaphor and Metonymy in Expressions for Linguistic Action.” Cognitive
Linguistics 1(3): 323–342.
Guattari, Félix. 2016. Lines
of Flight: For another World of Possibilities. Bloomsbury Academic, London.
Hariman, Robert. 2008. “Political
Parody and Public Culture.” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 94 (3): 247–272.
Hendriks, Carolyn M, Selen A Ercan and John Boswell. 2020. Mending
Democracy: Democratic Repair in Disconnected
Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hersey, Curt W. 2013. Nothing but the Truthiness: A History
of Television News Parody and Its Entry into the Journalistic Field. Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura and Blanca Kraljevic-Mujic. 2011. “Multimodal
Metonymy and Metaphor as Complex Discourse Resources for Creativity in ICT Advertising
Discourse.” Review of Cognitive
Linguistics 9 (1): 153–178.
Hsu, Iju. 2023. “Winespeak
in Wine’s Pics: How Metaphor and Metonymy Construct a Visual Winespeak Narrative in the Manga Drops of
God.” Cognitive Linguistic
Studies 10(1): 33–56.
Huntington, Heidi. 2016. “Pepper
Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political
Rhetoric.” Communication
Studies 67 (1): 77–93.
Igwebuike, Ebuka Elias and Lily Chimuanya. 2021. “Legitimating
Falsehood in Social Media: A Discourse Analysis of Political Fake News.” Discourse and
Communication 15 (1): 42–58.
Jennings, Freddie J., Josh C. Bramlett, and Benjamin R. Warner. 2019. “Comedic
Cognition: The Impact of Elaboration on Political Comedy Effects.” Western Journal of
Communication 83 (3): 365–382.
Jones, Jeffrey P., and Geoffrey Baym. 2010. “A
Dialogue on Satire News and the Crisis of Truth in Postmodern Political Television.” Journal of
Communication
Inquiry 34 (3): 278–294.
Källstig, Amanda. 2021. “Laughing
in the Face of Danger: Performativity and Resistance in Zimbabwean Stand-up Comedy.” Global
Society 35 (1): 45–60.
Kashanizadeh, Zahra, and Charles Forceville. 2020. “Visual
and Multimodal Interaction of Metaphor and Metonymy A Study of Iranian and Dutch Print
Advertisements.” Cognitive Linguistic
Studies 7 (1): 78–110.
Kirner-Ludwig, Monika. 2020. “Internet
Memes as Multilayered Re-Contextualization Vehicles in Lay-Political Online Discourse.” The
Pragmatics of Internet
Memes 3 (2): 283–320.
Landreville, Kristen D., R. Lance Holbert, and Heather L. LaMarre. 2010. “The
Influence of Late-Night TV Comedy Viewing on Political Talk: A Moderated-Mediation
Model.” International Journal of
Press/Politics 15 (4): 482–498.
Lawrence, Regina G., and Amber E. Boydstun. 2017. “What
We Should Really Be Asking about Media Attention to Trump.” Political
Communication 341, 150–153.
Leach, Colin Wayne, and Aerielle M. Allen. 2017. “The
Social Psychology of the Black Lives Matter Meme and Movement.” Current Directions in
Psychological
Science 26 (6): 543–547.
Leicht, Caroline V. 2023. “Nightly News or Nightly Jokes?
News Parody as a Form of Political Communication: A Review of the Literature.” Political
Studies
Review 21 (2): 390–399.
Lichtenstein, Dennis and Cordula Nitsch. 2018. “Informativ
und kritisch? Die Politikdarstellung in Deutschen Satiresendungen.” M&K Medien und
Kommunikationswissenschaft 66 (1): 5–21.
Lipson, David, Mark Boukes and Samira Khemkhem. 2023. “The
Glocalization of The Daily Show.” Popular
Communication 1–15.
Literat, Ioana, and Sarah van den Berg. 2019. “Buy
Memes Low, Sell Memes High: Vernacular Criticism and Collective Negotiations of Value on Reddit’s
MemeEconomy.” Information, Communication &
Society 22 (2): 232–249.
Maglio, Tony. 2022. “What
Will Happen to ‘The Daily Show’ After Trevor Noah?” Retrieved from: [URL]
Martynyuk, Alla and Olga Meleshchenko. 2022. “Socio-Pragmatic
Potential of (Verbo)-Visual Metaphtonymy in Internet memes Featuring Donald Trump.” Metaphor
and the Social
World 12 (1):69–91.
McChesney, Robert W. 2011. “Foreword.” In The
Stewart/Colbert Effect: Essays on the Real Impacts of Fake News edited by Amarnath Amarasingam, 1–2. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Michaud Wild, Nickie. 2019. “‘The
Mittens of Disapproval Are on’: John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight as Neoliberal
Critique.” Communication, Culture &
Critique 12 (3): 340–358.
Musolff, Andreas. 2021. “Hyperbole
and Emotionalisation: Escalation of Pragmatic Effects of Proverb and Metaphor in the “Brexit”
Debate.” Russian Journal of
Linguistics 25 (3): 628–644.
Nærland, Torgeir Uberg. 2020. “From Pleasure to Politics:
Five Functions of Watching TV-Series for Public Connection.” European Journal of
Communication 35 (2): 93–107.
Nooney, Laine and Laura Portwood-Stacer. 2014. “One
Does not Simply: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Internet memes.” Journal of Visual
Culture 13 (3): 248–252.
Ödmark, Sara and Jonas Harvard. 2021. “The
Democratic Roles of Satirists.” Popular
Communication 19 (4): 281–294.
Otto, Lukas, Isabella Glogger, and Mark Boukes. 2017. “The
Softening of Journalistic Political Communication: A Comprehensive Framework Model of Sensationalism, Soft News, Infotainment,
and Tabloidization.” Communication
Theory 27 (2): 136–155.
Partington, Alan. 2010. “Modern
Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK Newspapers: An Overview of the
Project.” Corpora 5 (2): 83–108.
. 2018. “Welcome
to the First Issue of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies.” Journal of Corpora and
Discourse
Studies,
1
(1), 1–7.
Peifer, Jason, and Taeyoung Lee. 2019. Satire
and Journalism. Oxford: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication.
Pérez-Sobrino, Paula. 2016. “Multimodal
Metaphor and Metonymy in Advertising: A Corpus-Based Account.” Metaphor and
Symbol 31(2): 73–90.
Prochazka, Fabian, Patrick Weber, and Wolfgang Schweiger. 2018. “Effects
of Civility and Reasoning in User Comments on Perceived Journalistic Quality.” Journalism
Studies 19(1): 62–78.
Radden, Günter. 2018. “Molly
married money: Reflections on conceptual metonymy”. In O. Blanco-Carrión, A. Barcelona, & R. Pannain (Eds.), Conceptual
Metonymy: Methodological, theoretical, and descriptive
issues (pp. 161–181). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Randolph, Justus. 2008. Online
Kappa Calculator. [URL]
Reyes, Antonio. 2011. “Strategies
of Legitimization in Political Discourse: From Words to Actions.” Discourse &
Society 22 (6): 781–807.
Riegert, Kristina. 2007. Politicotainment.
Television’s Take on the Real. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Ross, Andrew S., and Damian J Rivers. 2017. “Digital
Cultures of Political Participation: Internet Memes and the Discursive Delegetimization of the 2016 U.S Presidential
Candidates.” Discourse, Context &
Media. 161 (2017): 1–11.
Ruiz de Mendoza, Francisco J and Alicia Galera-Masegosa. 2011. “Going
beyond Metaphtonymy: Metaphoric and Metonymic Complexes in Phrasal Verb
Interpretation.” Language
Value 3 (1), 1–29.
Sadeghi, Bahador, Mohammad Taghi Hassani and Vahid Jalali. 2014. “Towards
(De-) Legitimation Discursive Strategies in News Coverage of Egyptian Protest: VOA & Fars News in
Focus.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral
Sciences 981: 1580–1589.
Said, Hala Mohammed. 2017. “Legitimation Strategies
in Egyptian Political Discourse.” Master’s Thesis Submitted to The Department of Applied
Linguistics. The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt.
Savolainen, Reijo. 2021. Infotainment
as a hybrid of information and entertainment: a conceptual analysis. Journal of
Documentation 78 (4): 953–970.
Serazio, Michael. 2018. “Producing
Popular Politics: The Infotainment Strategies of American Campaign Consultants.” Journal of
Broadcasting & Electronic
Media 62 (1): 131–146.
Smith, David. 2023. ‘He
had a different perspective’: how Trevor Noah changed late-night satire. The
Guardian. Retrieved from: [URL]
Thussu, Daya Kishan. 2010. News as Entertainment: The Rise of
Global Infotainment. London & New York: SAGE.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2007. “Legitimation
in Discourse and Communication”. Discourse &
Communication 1 (1): 91–112.
Van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining
the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Vaara, Eero. 2014. “Struggles
over Legitimacy in the Eurozone Crisis: Discursive Legitimation Strategies and their Ideological
Underpinnings.” Discourse &
Society 25 (4): 500–518.
Vestergaard, Anne and Julie Uldam. 2022. “Legitimacy
and Cosmopolitanism: Online Public Debates on (Corporate) Responsibility.” Journal of Business
Ethics 176(2): 227–240.
Vettehen, Paul Hendriks, Johannes Beentjes, Koos Nuijten, and Allerd Peeters. 2011. “Arousing
News Characteristics in Dutch Television News 1990–2004: An Exploration of Competitive
Strategies.” Mass Communication &
Society 14 (1): 93–112.
Wagner, A., and Schwarzenegger, C. (2020). “A
populism of lulz. The proliferation of humor, satire, and memes as populist communication in digital
culture,” in Perspectives on Populism and the
Media, ed. B. Krämer, and C. HoltzBacha (Baden-Baden: Nomos), 313–332.
Widholm, Andreas and Ester Appelgren. 2020. “A
Softer Kind of Hard News? Data Journalism and the Digital Renewal of Public Service News in
Sweden.” New Media +
Society 24 (6): 1363–1381.
Xenos, Michael A and Amy B. Becker. 2009. “Moments
of Zen: Effects of The Daily Show on Information Seeking and Political Learning.” Political
Communication 261, 317–332.
Young, Dannagal Goldthwaite, and Lindsay Hoffman. 2012. “Acquisition
of Current-Events Knowledge from Political Satire Programming: An Experimental
Approach.” Atlantic Journal of
Communication 20 (5): 290–304.
Zaheer, Lubna. 2016. “Effects
of watching political talk shows on political efficacy and political participation.” Journal of
Political
Studies 23 (2): 357–372.
Zekavat, Maseeh. 2021. “Employing
Satire and Humor in Facing a
Pandemic.” Humor 34 (2): 283–304.