Basically, this study concluded that satire is lost on closed-minded idiots. At first I thought it was one of those Onion thingees.From 1979's An abstract of ED178981 - Dogmatism, Intelligence, and the Understanding/Appreciation of Editorial Satire by Charles R. Gruner:
In a study of satire as persuasion, two experiments were conducted--one to determine whether dogmatism affected the understanding and appreciation of editorial satire, the second to determine the same about intelligence as measured by the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In the first experiment, 116 college students read three satirical editorials. After reading each satire, each subject checked one statement from a list of five that he or she thought was the author's thesis. Each also rated the satire on a seven-step semantic-differential scale ranging from "extremely funny" to "extremely unfunny." Finally, each subject responded to a ten-item dogmatism scale. The same procedures were used in the second experiment, which involved 59 students. In this experiment, the subjects also read three editorial satires. Their verbal and quantitative scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test obtained from school records. Data from the two experiments suggest that both dogmatism and intelligence affect understanding and appreciation of satire, but in ways more complicated than are currently known.
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