The extended “The Colbert Report” gag involving Stephen Colbert starting a super PAC and running for president in 2012 did more than just amuse viewers (and eventually help win the show an Emmy in 2013.)

Regular viewers of the “Colbert Report” during the 2012 election cycle were better educated about the campaign finance law following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United than the viewers of more traditional news outlets, according to study done by researchers at Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and the Pew Research Center. The study, titled "Stephen Colbert's Civics Lesson," was part of larger research the Annenberg Public Policy Center is undertaking in examining the media’s ability to educate the public.

“What we weren’t kind of expecting was the fact that 'The Colbert Report’ would outperform other news sources in teaching citizens about these groups,” says Annenberg senior researcher and the study’s lead author Bruce Hardy, referring to the campaign finance organizations known as super PACs and 501(c)(4)s that are playing an increasing role in the electoral process.

He and his fellow researchers phone surveyed more than 1,200 adults, some of them regular viewers of the “The Colbert Report,” others dependent on more traditional news sources such as Fox, MSNBC and CNN, as well as broadcast news, newspapers and talk radio. The researchers tested their subjects’ perceived knowledge about the political fundraising – how much they thought they knew about super PACs and 501(c)(4)s – as well as their actual knowledge, by asking them to identify a series of true-or-false statements about these groups. Researchers found that, even after controlled for general political knowledge and other factors, “Colbert Report” viewers had both a higher perceived knowledge and higher actual knowledge about campaign finance groups when compared to those who preferred more conventional news sources.

Colbert, playing a satirical right wing news show host, created his own super PAC – called "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow" – in 2011 with the help of Trevor Potter, the former commissioner and chairman of the U.S. Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel on Sen. John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential runs.

“Having Trevor Potter be a part of it – he is a very important character in this story of the Colbert super PAC,” Hardy says, pointing specifically to the moment in the parody’s run when Potter said there wasn’t much difference between money laundering and in how 501(c)(4s) and super PACs interacted.

“The fact that it is so shocking and so broken down in detail, it just captivated everyone’s attention and it really just had this great effect on everyone understanding what was going on,” Hardy says.

Potter appeared on the show often to explain the ins and outs of using these groups to raise money and influence elections. The gag, which won "The Colbert Report" a Peabody Award in 2012, culminated with Colbert announcing he would put his name on the South Carolina presidential primary ballot, but not before he handed over control of his super PAC to his late night cohort Jon Stewart, in a memorable spot talked about throughout the media.

“His direct engagement was something that no other media source was doing,” Hardy says.

The study, which was published online in the journal Mass Communication and Society, cites other research that has been done into why humor and satire can be an effective tool for education.

“Most humor is delivery unexpectedly, so it makes you have to take second and say, 'What just happened?'” Hardy says. “We take our cognitive resources and we focus on what just happened and we try to figure it out because we want to get the humor. When we do that, we spend more resources integrating it into our cognitive structures. Therefore we engage in it and engagement leads to retention.”

"Stephen Colbert's Civics Lesson" also compares its results to a study done in 2008 that showed Stewart’s "The Daily Show" was less successful than traditional news media in informing viewers about the Supreme Court nomination process. Hardy says that in this case, “The Colbert Report” was particularly effective because of both the detail the show went into to understand the dense topic of political fundraising as well as the narrative arc of its examination that lasted many months over throughout the 2012 election cycle.

“Every week there would be something new that [the show was] adding and progressing [in] the actual process and how the relationships between super PACs and 501(c)(4)s worked,“ Hardy says. "You got to watch it in a way where you get to see the process, as opposed to a news source where they would just give you the inverted pyramid kind of structure and tell you, 'This is the way it is.'”