The role of ironic discourse in the construction of an impersonated speaker’s ethos: Parody of the political interview

The satirical news program is a television genre that recycles discourse from traditional media sources, with the aim of creating a distorted staging of information. We propose a dialogic and enunciative reflection on verbal irony, particularly as it relates to the ethos developed within fictional interactions in the parodic sequences of a satirical news broadcast. We are interested specifically in the relationship between (i) the dialogic interaction, in which the ironic discourse interacts with the previous discourse of the impersonated politician, and (ii) the dialogal interaction between the host of the satirical news program and the impersonator. From the study of our corpus of 60 sequences from two French TV shows, we show that the dialogic functioning of verbal irony plays a role in the construction of the other’s ethos. The ironic discourse attributed to the caricatured characters representing the politicians can not only distort the discourse held by the latter but also deform the image that they had been seeking to project of themselves.