Satirizing Ethics

I explored three late-night satirical monologues from late-night television following the Orlando Nightclub Shooting on 12 June 2016. I examined the monologues using a social constructionist approach to understand what lessons could be drawn from the event and how a satirist references the nomos when tackling an issue in the world. Satire uses comedic tools to point out follies within society and each host used his or her platform on late-night television to address issues they believed needed to be addressed following the shooting. What I found was that each host aimed to set an agenda in their monologues by emphasizing a) certain facts and information about the event and by b) presenting the audience with a way of viewing what happened and why the issue of gun violence and hate crimes in American needs to be addressed to ensure incidents like these do not happened again.