NEWSWORKS TONIGHT

Think you're too smart for the latest political advertising smear-campaign?

Think again.

"The difference between highly educated people—elites—and the rest of the population is that elites don't think they're influenced by advertising," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

And she knows better. She's the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The center launched FactCheck.org back in 2003. The site breaks down political ads and speeches to get at what's true and what's deception. In a very detailed manner.

Jamieson said FactCheck features "traditional journalism, in print, long-form, propositional, very earnest and extremely helpful if you like to read print in long form."

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Problem is, not many people do. Even if they do, the incorrect information in the ads that run over and over just sticks in the brain.

"How does that one little print FactCheck take down all those ad exposures?" said Jamieson.

Well, there's bad news. "It doesn't," she said. "Even if you read the FactCheck, the ad is likely to override it." 

So Jamieson is fighting fire with fire. 

She's launching FlackCheck.org, a site that takes all that good, academic information from FactCheck.org, and turns it into short, funny videos. 

Funny is key—it helps the correct information stick in the brain. 

Jamieson had a problem, though: Penn professors and researchers? Not the funniest people around.  

"Enter our graduate Dannagal Goldthwaite Young," said Jamieson, "who was a stand-up comedian by background, does have a Ph.D. from Annenberg, is inherently funny and is a college professor." 

Danna Young is the talent coordinator for the new site and assistant professor of communication at the University of Delaware.

She's also a regular performer at ComedySportz, a weekly comedy improv show in Rittenhouse Square. 

At a recent performance, she was competing in a pun-off.

"I saw a movie about cats that was so bad," said Young in a tense, pun-or-lose moment, "I could not bear to stay to the tail end." 

The audience groaned. But in a good way.

In her Westmont, New Jersey home the next week, Young expained the concept of funny.

"Humor results from two mis-matched things coming together, and the listener has to somehow make sense of those things that are mis-matched. And somehow the listener has to bridge that gap—that's the punchline," said Young. "That's the unexpected ka-boom that results in humor." 

That cat pun from her improv performance is a very simple example.

Here, she's tackling something a little more difficult.

"One of the most deceptive ads of 2011 was an ad put out by the League of Women Voters," said Young.

It claims that by voting against a clean air bill, a certain lawmaker was responsible for rising asthma rates.

Watch the video below to see the offending ad:

"It's powerful because both of my kids have asthma. So both of my kids are that little kid in that scary mask," said Young. 

Problem is, there isn't actually a connection between the sort of gasses that cause asthma, and the gasses addressed in that bill.

So, how do you make this funny?

"Well, I don't know," said Young. "But I tried."

In her (unpublished) video, Young talks directly in to her computer's camera. "The problem, from an ad-makers perspective, is that footage of depleting ozone layer? Not scary. Footage of sad, sick child in arms of equally sad parent? Scary. Especially when that child is apparently a very crappy colorer."

Young said she thinks the video riff works because "obviously that child is not a crappy colorer. That is fiction. It's a child that's been told to scribble on a piece of paper, just as what is going on in the rest of the ad is equally fictitious. By exposing that as fiction through irony, it should expose the rest as being fiction through irony."

In other words, that ka-boom—the punchline helps you remember the truth.

Right now at FlackCheck.org, you can see other parodies of the worst ads of 2011. Starting in January, the site will keep up with real-time fact checks.

Young hopes the project doesn't go too far, though.

"We want to make sure that when we're putting together these spots," she said, "we're not inadvertently fostering this apathetic, disengaged cynicism that's 'Oh, they're all full of it. I'm gonna stay home on election day.'"

Because, Young said, even if we can't help that we're influenced by advertising, if we know the truth, we can vote with confidence.