ELEANOR HALL: He was a key player in the recent US election.

He wasn't officially standing for either party but he started his own political action committee - or superPAC - and he had a national audience of millions throughout the campaign.

Stephen Colbert is one of the most successful political comedians in the United States.

Now a Professor at Pennsylvania University has written a book about him and his influence on US democracy and political culture.

Sophia McClennan is at the Center for Global Studies and is the author of Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy.

She joined me earlier from Pennsylvania.

Professor McClennen, you say in your book that you really first noticed the power of Stephen Colbert in his 2006 White House Correspondents' Associations Dinner and his roasting of president George W Bush. He'd been around before then. What was it about that performance that made you want to write a book about him?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: You know, truth is that prior to that event I didn't know who he was, like many of his subsequent fans. The event was captured on the internet and became totally viral and that's how I first saw it and it was immediately in that moment that I thought wow, this man is doing something really innovative with his satire and of course he was opening up the space for dissent in a moment in US history when dissent was really difficult.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Wow, what an honour. Actually to sit here at the same table with my hero, George W Bush. Guys like us, we're not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol, we're not members of the factinista, we go straight from the gut. That's where the truth lies, right sir?

ELEANOR HALL: You say that dissent was really difficult. To what extent was satire like Colbert's a product of the sort of media and political culture in the US post-9/11?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Yeah, you know it really kind of amazing to watch today because a lot of the environment after 9/11 has been forgotten I think and the reality is that journalists face self-pressure to self-censor. There were very few cases where you felt that people weren't being pressured and so using Colbert and Jon Stewart, satire was really unique in the sense that it was able to be critical but it got away with it.

ELEANOR HALL: So why was satire able to occupy this space? I mean wouldn't joking about terrorism and political reaction to it be even more difficult in a nation going through such a hyper-patriotic phase?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Absolutely. Not all humour is the same and in this particular case what Stephen Colbert does is he occupies the version of an extreme exaggerated right wing pundit so he's doing something we used to hearing but he is doing it in such an exaggerated way that he calls out the ridiculousness of it.

STEPHEN COLBERT: You're takin' bread out of my kids' mouths (laughter) because I'm a pundit, okay. Those of us in the punditocracy make our bread and butter by telling people what the truth is as we see it from our gut. Right?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: So because he's sort of winking at the audience, he's not saying wow, you know, terrorists are great. He is going instead in the opposite direction saying well all terrorists are terrible which means that all people who are Islamic must be terrible and anybody who knows someone who is an Islamic must be. Right, so he goes and takes it the other way and he gets away with saying a lot of things that other comedians wouldn't be able to get away with.

ELEANOR HALL: Now you were investigating how much of a political and current affairs education, in a sense, US viewers got from satire like Colbert's as opposed to watching actual news programs. How were you able to quantify this?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: I don't do that kind of research myself but a lot of folks are doing it and so I had the benefit of seeing it. In fact after my book came out even more research has been done, specifically on what people know and what they consume in terms of their media and what we found - I say we in terms of professors, right - is that there's now pretty incontrovertible proof that the satirists are doing a very good job of educating the public about what's happening in the world and in many cases, Jon Stewart for instance scores higher than people who watch any of the major news networks.

ELEANOR HALL: What about those in the audience who you point out don't get that Stephen Colbert is actually playing a character, that he is not really an extreme right-wing talk show host but is in fact mocking those views?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Yes, that's why in fact though his viewers aren't scoring as high as Jon Stewart because sometimes Colbert seems to be so adorably embodying the racist, you know, persona or the anti-immigrant persona. It can sometime be the case that the satire is simply lost. So it is much trickier than what Stewart does.

ELEANOR HALL: Isn't it possible that rather than bringing a critical perspective on news and politics to a wider audience, he is just preaching to the converted - either those who like his in-character statements or those who see the irony already?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Well, you know, that's what happening with me, right (laughs). You know, your question is really a question in some ways about demographic because I'm, you know, in my mid-40s so for me this I get but his main demographic is 18 to 35 year olds. In fact many of his main demographic don't really have much of a pre-9/11 memory so I think that's one of the most exciting things about these shows is the way in which they're reaching out to young viewers who in fact, as we know now, are voting at a higher percentage in the United States than say the generations that are older.

But he and Stewart are more aggressively engaged in direct political action than we've seen in a lot of cases of earlier US satirists.

ELEANOR HALL: And do you think such a merging of the real and the satirical does pose dangers for US democracy? I mean, is it a sign of how degraded US politics has become that a comedian can mock it by engaging in it?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Yeah, you know, I mean, that is absolutely the smartest question, right. That's the one we are trying to figure out the answer to and we're seeing this a lot in Europe. A lot of very powerful satirists that are getting involved in politics, you've got parties that are literally completely satirical parties. So we are starting to wonder what's going on.

And mockery in and of itself isn't good, like you said. It can just make people apathetic, it can make people just disgusted and withdrawn.

But true satire is really meant to get people to think critically and to do something about it.

ELEANOR HALL: Stephen Colbert though insists he is not trying to affect politics. Is that credible to you?

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Um, no (laughs). But I'll tell you what is the thing, you know, both Colbert and Stewart will repeatedly when asked like, oh aren't you guys crossing the line or aren't you really engaging in politics, they will insist that they're entertainers.

This is why they are not straight politicians. I don't think those two things have to be mutually exclusive though. If you surveyed the landscape of what people were doing after 9/11 and then you look at what Colbert was able to do in terms of we could have had the young people even more disaffected and disconnected and not voting and giving up and that's not what's happening in the United States today and I credit Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart a lot with turning that around.

ELEANOR HALL: Well, Sophia McClennen it is certainly a fascinating book. Thanks very much for joining us.

SOPHIA MCCLENNEN: Well, thank you for having me.

ELEANOR HALL: That's Sophia McClennen, Professor at Pennsylvania University, who has written a book about Stephen Colbert called Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy.