Turning The Wage Gap into a Dump
John Oliver’s use of metaphor and analogy as a framing device
by Dannagal G. Young, Ph.D. with Morgan Pfister (M.A., University of Delaware)
In a 2014 episode of Last Week Tonight on HBO, John Oliver engaged in a 7 minute exploration of the issue of the “wage gap,” the gap that exists between the earnings of women and men in the United States. To open the segment, Oliver expressed frustration with media coverage of the issue, especially the fact that news coverage tends to debate the size of the wage gap, rather than exploring how and why its mere existence is a problem. Oliver introduces footage of media correspondents disputing the exact monetary amount and percentage of cents earned by women for every dollar earned by men (Do women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn? Or is it 88 cents? Or 96 cents?). But, to quickly and efficiently illustrate that the problem is not the size of the wage gap, but rather the existence of the wage gap, Oliver used a short, pointed analogy (as he often does).
Look even if 96 cents [cents on the dollar] is the number, which it isn’t, it’s still terrible. Let me put this in terms that are perhaps easier to understand. If someone takes a dump on my desk, the size of the dump is not the issue. I’m not going to say, “Well how big of a dump is it? Eight inches? Ten inches? Oh, just three inches? Well, that’s almost like you didn’t take a dump on my desk at all”.
John Oliver tapped into a humorous vehicle that he has perfected as a way of simplifying and distilling complex policy issues: the humorous analogy.
Analogy and humor are both rhetorical devices that result from a form of semantic incongruity, making them a naturally compatible pair. Incongruity is at the heart of humor. Incongruity theory is the fundamental theory of humor that most cognitive psychologists apply when examining its construction and effects. In Arthur Koestler’s 1964 work, The Act of Creation, he explains how humor results from the simultaneous activation of two seemingly incompatible schemas, or frames of reference in the mind. We “bissociate” the two schemas momentarily, and then must activate some additional piece of information to reconcile the two and make then fit together. This incongruity, followed by reconciliation, is what results in an explosion of mirth or laughter.
Analogies and metaphors lend themselves to the efficient construction of humor, as they explicitly rely on pairs of schemas or frames of reference that seem incongruous on first glance. Like humor, analogies require a resolution of that incongruity to be understood. According to Osborn and Ehninger (1962), “By relating divergent ideas, objects, or qualities, the receiver reduces the semantic distance between them, and they are brought into proximity of meaning sufficiently close so that the common base or ground upon which they rest is recognized” (p. 231). In analogies, the first schema (or frame of reference or mental model) pertains to the new thing you’re trying to understand (e.g.; the wage gap), and the second is the schema of the thing you already understand (e.g. taking a dump on a desk). By looking at the first thing (wage gap) through the lens of the second (defecation), not only is that first thing suddenly simple and distilled, but it is also encoded with valence:
Defecation on a desk = bad, regardless of the size of that defecation.
Wage gap = bad, regardless of the size of the gap.
According to Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the second frame of reference — the one that is familiar and tangible (the dump, in this case) — serves as the “source domain.” It consists of attributes, processes, and relationships that are directly experienced, and so are familiar and accessible to the listener. When processing such experiential analogies, listeners will access the source domain and attempt to use it to impose order and meaning on new or lesser-developed schema, known as the “target domain.” As Deignan explains, “the way we mentally organize the target domain is partly determined by the organization of the source domain” (Deignan, 2010, p. 45).
So powerful are metaphors, argued Stanford Communication Professor Arthur Hastings (1970), that a shift in the base domain (or language) used to understand a target domain will change all accompanying perceptions and beliefs accordingly. “In satire, a consistent but emotionally appropriate framework is superimposed on a situation in contrast to the normal interpretation” (Hastings, 1970, p. 185). When a metaphorical situation is introduced, the appropriate framework moves into consciousness and provides a new interpretation and emotional response. And once a situation (e.g., the wage gap) is understood in terms of the base domain (e.g., defecation on a desk), the target is forever changed. Linguistics Professor, Jonathan Charteris-Black (2011), suggests that, “Rhetorically, metaphors contribute to mental representations of political issues, making alternative ways of understanding these issues more difficult and in so doing ‘occupy’ the mind” (p. 28).
In other words, once an audience has imposed “desk-defecation” on top of the wage gap schema, the “size” of the wage gap fails to matter, as the “size” of the dump doesn’t matter at all.
And perhaps this is the most important aspect of the strategic use of analogy and metaphor in satire. Such devices are not used merely to help illuminate the internal logic or dynamics of an unfamiliar and complex domain. Instead, analogies and metaphors can be used to deliberately impose evaluative meaning on contested issues or topics (Zinken, 2007), making them a useful tool to reframe those issues. Robert Entman (1993) proposed that framing involves “selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (p. 52). Frames are lenses through which communicators help to define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies (Entman, 1993). Strategic communicators, including John Oliver, make conscious framing judgments when deciding what aspects of a subject to highlight in such a way that will shape audience’s perceptions of the causes, evaluations, or possible solutions to said problem. Due to their unique capacity to illuminate a lesser known target domain in light of a more familiar one, analogies and metaphors help comics simplify, clarify, and reframe lesser known political realities, all the while naturally satisfying humor’s need for two seemingly incongruous — even ridiculous — schemas.
In this example, by focusing on the vile nature of desk-defecation itself, Oliver moves the conversation away from the size of the dump to the existence of said dump, thereby shifting audiences away from the contested “size of the wage gap,” to the existence of said wage gap. Once this emotionally charged (disgust) frame has reoriented us to the issue altogether, the next logical questions (based off of the defecation frame) become: Who is responsible for the gap (dump)? How do we get them to stop paying women less (dumping)?
And voila: Oliver has successfully “…selected some aspects of a perceived reality [the existence of the wage gap] and made it more salient in a communicating text [his comedy show], in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition [the size of the gap isn’t the problem, it’s the existence of the gap], causal interpretation [the people paying women less than men are responsible], moral evaluation [Any gap is bad, no matter how small], and/or treatment recommendation [pay women the same as men] for the item described.”
Now excuse me, but I need to go craft some metaphors and analogies based on fraternity parties and keg stands to help my students understand digital technologies and the redistribution of political and cultural power.
