Antagonisms, involving satiric media, and the tragedy of Charlie Hebdo highlight the need to address political humour as an overlooked domain of public sphere and peculiar form of political argument. No unanimous agreement exists on how political humour works today: is it a precarious seedbed of political cynicism and conflict, or satisfactory means of political reasoning, knowledge? Political humour in mass media remains a “black box”, often treated as a single communication genre, assimilating various hybrid formats with potentially different political ‘charge’. Build on a quantitative approach (representative survey data), the paper explores distinctive modes of reception of Lithuanian televised satiric news programme and evaluates their relationship with political sophistication and political learning. Results testify that ‘serious’ mode of reception triggers active but critical citizenship (Rosanvallon, 2008), however, the mode itself, or the way pragmatic ambivalence of satire is tackled, depends on a number of characteristics of citizen audiences.
