How Humor Can Help Americans Overcome Their Political Polarization

Are you planning to speak politics at Thanksgiving dinner this 12 months?

Depending on your loved ones’s dynamics, it may be fraught with hazard. But filmmaker Rob Feld, director of a brand new documentary referred to as “Jesters and Fools,” says there’s a technique to navigate such conversations with out resorting to creating acrimony.

“I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving with loved ones,” Feld tells The Daily Signal. “Don’t be afraid to talk about things, but there are good ways to talk about things. And it’s by asking questions of each other and not trying to repress that desire we all have to just attack.”

Feld’s movie, “Jesters and Fools,” challenges the favored media narrative that we’re hopelessly divided as Americans. He recruited fashionable comedians like Colin Quinn, Jim Norton, and Rosebud Baker to inform the story.

“I’m a journalist by trade and background,” Feld says. “I need facts and data, something I can demonstrate. And humor is a great way to wrap it all in sugar.”

To make the movie, Feld discovered himself spending his nights at Comedy Cellar, a membership in New York City. He started to recruit comedians to look within the movie, utilizing humor to inform the story.

Using the analysis of Duke University professor Chris Bail, director of the Polarization Lab, Feld found that social media and know-how are main us to assume we’re hopelessly divided. He created the documentary to problem these assumptions, with the aim of bringing Americans collectively quite than additional dividing them by means of on-line feuds.

Feld hopes “Jesters and Fools,” with its use of humor, can decrease the temperature and scale back polarization.