"Understand satire displaces critical thinking with decoding Heather Lamar identified what she calls "the Paradox of satire": when audiences watch political comedy, most of their mental energy goes toward figuring out who the joke is targeting, leaving very little cognitive capacity to actually evaluate the underlying argument. As Lamar explains, "all of the thinking or a lot of the thinking becomes devoted to what the comic means, who the target of the joke is" and as a result they "spend less time thinking about whether that warrants any kind of real consideration." This means that satire, however brilliant, is a poor vehicle for actually persuading anyone to reconsider a political position. Source: Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History, Satire"