An article in USA Today points out that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have helped bring science to a wider public by hosting scientists who discuss an issue of importance such as climate change or their new book on a topic of public interest.

A scan of the cultural anthropologists who have appeared on both shows reveals a total of zero.

K. David Harrison, who appeared on The Colbert Report, is a linguist and ethnobotanist who does fieldwork and employs ethnographic research methods. He is an expert on endangered languages, Director of Research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and author of When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge and the co-author of Book of Peoples of the World: A Guide to Cultures, published by National Geographic. But he teaches in the linguistics department and doesn’t self-identity on his website as a cultural anthropologist.

Cultural anthropologists are few in number compared to other scientists, and most cultural anthropologists do not write books targeted for a non-academic audience. So that’s part of the explanation for their being overlooked by Daily and Colbert. Other factors are probably the same ones discussed in an earlier post about the lack of presence in the mainstream media compared to biological anthropology and archaeology.  Perhaps cultural anthropology lacks shazam appeal?  Perhaps it relies too much on fieldwork and not enough on “truthiness”?

I have some ideas as to who I would invite if I were Stewart of Colbert. Paul Farmer would be at the top of my list.  So how can we raise the cultural anthropology awareness of these two great comedians?

Image: “Stephen Colbert” from flickr user lleugh, licensed with Creative Commons.