'Let Us Eat Cake': The Tina Fey Effect in 2017
The aftermath of Charlottesville has brought up important questions about who should be speaking, and who should be listening.
In published in the , a group of researchers shared the results of a study they had done in the aftermath of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The researchers, based on panels with young voters, found that the that Tina Fey had made famous on —“I can see from my !”—had changed the public’s feeling about the actual vice-presidential candidate. Fey’s jokes, the researchers suggested, had proven comedy’s power, especially in times of question and perhaps also in times of crisis, to shape people’s sense of the world. The jokes had woven themselves into the workings of American democracy. The researchers called it the Fey Effect.
