Kelly connects with Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include political media effects, public opinion, political satire and the psychology of political humor. Her books include “Irony and Outrage” and “Wrong.” She’s also an improviser.  

You talk in your book about the right/left schism being a schism of Outrage vs. Irony. 

“Of course, you’re going to have people who are really monitoring for threats in their environment, cultural conservatives who like routine and order and straight talk and hyperbole. They’re going to be really drawn to both creating and consuming the kind of outreach stuff we get from like Fox News or Rush Limbaugh – versus that sort of playful experimental, don’t tell you exactly what to think attitude from the left, where I create juxtapositions that invite you to play and come to certain conclusions, that is very much in keeping with a liberal sort of psychology.” 

You also see a connecting point between science and improv. 

“With this administration and funding for science and medicine and higher ed and all these cuts that are being enacted, there’s so many allegations about higher ed being politically biased and that science is biased. If you think about the ethos of science, we never remove ourselves from doubt. We are never content with a feeling that we’re right. We’re never certain. We’re always hypothesis testing. We’re always open to the possibility we could be wrong. Science is improv. Science is ‘Yes, And,’ constant ‘Yes, And.’ Constantly being open to the possibility that there’s another piece out there, the scene’s never done, right?  I think there is something inherent in the scientific process that is a lot more compatible with liberal psychology. And so, we shouldn’t be surprised that you end up with a whole lot of folks in these spaces that do tend to be politically liberal.” 

I can’t believe our paths haven’t crossed before given the connections to improv and behavioral science – but we also have our own grief journeys that have been informed by our work – or that our work informs. 

“I do think that creative truth seeking and meaning making, which is what we’re both doing, is therapeutic. There’s an author named Penny Baker who writes about the healing properties of rewriting one’s own story and just how powerful that is for creating resilience because people have different levels of resilience. But if you actively take your pain and you build things out of it, not just arbitrary things, but things that tap into that pain and try to create meaning from the pain, I do think that it’s healing – especially if you allow yourself to somehow stay in a space that where you can tap into that grief, like for Nora, or, in my case, my late husband, Mike, who is my director of Comedy Sports Philadelphia, who helped found the company in 1999. If you can keep yourself in a space where you’re always flirting with ideas that that person would have enjoyed or would have been so excited knowing that you’re doing it, it keeps them right here in your work, you know? 

Photo Credit: Dana Romano Photography