Thanks to Ted for starting us off with this provocative clip and to Viveca and Amber for bringing up interesting and necessary questions of audience. Just to continue on with this discussion of interpretation a bit longer, it would seem important to ask which meanings from this segment – and the program more generally – are those that are most often “socially activated” (to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Gray’s ‘Watching with the Simpsons’) or even socially-sanctioned, and how this process takes place. For while the irony here may de-naturalize the dominant by highlighting its construction, and may reverberate with ambiguity, it is nonetheless subject to framing processes (e.g. advertising, program placement, mainstream accounts) that push reception in particular directions. This is not to undermine the polysemy of the text or the possibility of multiple interpretive positions, but just to come back to questions of context (discursive, commercial, social, political). But Viveca said it quite succinctly: context can be devastating.

Context can damn any well-meaning show, though, ironic or not. I can imagine skinheads watching Schindler's List, for instance, and cheering on Ralph Fiennes' character. That said, ironic/parodic/satiric shows seem to occupy particularly volatile space, where they're criticized for not being more explicit, yet to do so would involve a seriously unfunny and preachy level of didacticism. In some senses then, I think ironic communication draws our attention to a basic rule of much communication -- that for the audience member to truly feel involved in the production of meaning, there will always need to be the opportunity for them to reject what's there, and to create their own meaning(s). Thus, for instance, while a Saved by the Bell serious version of Stan's "you know I learnt something today" would no doubt leave less untidy semiotic strings than does something like this clip, I find it hard to imagine Zac or Slater's momentary political consciousness sinking in with audiences and being something as portable, use-able, and semiotically rich as something like this. To draw an analogy, I often tell my students that the A papers took a risk that the B+ ones were scared to take since they didn't want to be C+ papers; to me (and I realize this is all quite personal, not universal), South Park at its best can hit A's (though also some C+'s) while Saved by the Bell is playing for B+ at best.

Very good point about some texts being more or less stable, and SP clearly is one -- after all, it's been claimed as a conservative show, which to me seems odd, but shows how open it is to such a claim. As for didacticism, when I use that word I tend to think of a certain inflexibility. Jon Stewart hams it up, and though I'm convinced he cares deeply about what he says, and he effectively communicates this, comic rejoinders or not, but he opens the door for you to laugh it off. I think pure didacticism makes no such gesture, too besotted with its own feelings of self-righteousness. As for your latter questions, Viveca, I think it does open up *some* such lines in as much as it's allowed to use such a strategy of ifs, buts, and "instability," where mainstream left and right (if by this we mean the parties themselves, and the news?) only ever speak as though the earth is wholly solid underneath them. And I think that connects to the word itself and to being about race (or, at least, we can make it do so), since it signals the degree to which as race has been colonized by the field of politics, it's become quite rare to see less "stable" public discussions of it. And of the word itself, as evident in much mainstream punditocracy discussion in the wake of the Don Imus firing. Irony perhaps opens up some doors for a more contingent, less sure of itself discussion -- though I realize I'm speaking in ideals and best case scenarios here :-)