Prosodic markers of satirical imitation

Abstract Satirical imitation is a popular format of late-night comedy shows and can provide political entertainment and education. However, little research has been conducted on how satirists mark their satirical intent to clue audiences in on their intended messaging. This study investigates the prosodic marking of satirical imitation and contrasts it with prosodic marking of irony. We conducted a detailed case study of the prosodic marking in Alec Baldwin’s satirical imitation of Donald Trump in his audiobook You Can’t Spell America Without Me contrasted with both Baldwin’s and Trump’s regular voices. The analyzed corpus contained six hours of audio material across the three sources. Through a combination of automatic and manual coding, we measured average pitch, pitch variation, and speech rate. Our analysis did not reveal marking of satirical imitation by pitch or pitch variation. The satirical imitation was only marked by a faster speech rate than both baseline voices. These findings contrast with previous studies that identified a lower pitch, less pitch variation, and a slower speech rate as markers of verbal irony. Our study provides first evidence that satirical imitation is prosodically marked differently from verbal irony, with a faster speech rate as one potential marker.