Shaun, in the acousemetre words of Talk Soup, "Sooo Meaty!" You lay out the hyperbolic conundrum that surfaces when discussing the open-ended media effects political satires like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have on audiences (and millennial hipsters in particular, as you put it). This is the ultimate question not in terms of humorous affect but in the deliberative function of satire as social influence in a televisual society. I think one way to combat dangerous pits like catatonic voter turnout can be to curve audience behaviors from passive to active consumption. This is certainly one way we are trying to redirect student learning in the classroom and highlight the utility of popular culture, not as spectacular distraction from everyday tumult, but instead as springboard to re-engage the democratic ebb and flow of community at a local-region-national-global-contextual level. Let's not forget Colbert's Super PAC brought in an absurd amount of money, which we might equate to donors "wasting" economic currency toward a gimmick steeped in cultural currency, albeit a powerful one that was as absurd and as it was informative. And that was the point. When Colbert uses satire to educate, to slow down and inform whether ironically or in character, the Stephen Q. Colbert character becomes a kind of Mr. Rogers to audiences that may have spent more time texting and driving as opposed to listening to NPR on the radio. I would contend that when the writing reached these kinds of strategic peeks, the show found second life as viral material for many leading news sites the following days and even weeks. This is where that fuzzy trickster definition of "not journalism"-journalism comes into swing, which is something I expound upon more during Day 4's curation for the IMR Colbert Week. You leave us with an ethical dilemma and one that pits audiences between their national role as consumers vs. their natural role as humans. Are we to enjoy Colbert with coffee and cereal, legs kicked up in a recliner, or stream it feverishly on the way to city hall? Does Stephen work as corporate shill in service to the almighty dollar (Doritos! BudLite Lime! The Celebritizing Colbert Bump!), as a "funny" humanitarian with a platform, or as a lifelong entertainer still performing for his large family of siblings and beloved mother? As we tend to end so many of our scholarly conversations, the answer is not an either/or so much as a both/and. And yes, it seems even the New York Times is trying not to be upstaged by the forward-planning editors and contributors at In Media Res. );-)> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/arts/television/stephen-colbert-the-la...