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manage multiple layers associated with the two audiences they address, which may not be
seamlessly connected. As a panel member one is attentive to the local goal of the
program, to be Politically Incorrect, but there is also a larger goal that must be conscious
to participants of entertaining the masses while maintaining an appropriate image. This is
largely accomplished through talk. So just as panel members change their footing from
discussion participant to performer, they will change the content of their utterances. As
Goffman noted, members use a number of methods in the course of an interaction to
change footing from the role of active participant to that of performer. They will gesture
or look at the audience, change their intonation or make it explicit in language by address
or mention through language.
Goffman’s (1981) concept of footing uncovered some tensions between changes
in alignment with the audience and panel members. This illustrates the tensions and
dilemmas associated with the double articulation of this genre. Although this may not be
as evident in a talk show without an in-studio audience, during the course of the program
panel members choose whom they address throughout the course of the discussion. They
accomplish many things through the performance in distancing themselves from the
comment, reinforce a point, change the conversational tone or display themselves as
competent performers. Participants incorporate situated, action-oriented and constructive
rhetorical strategies into a conversation and accomplish a number of varied outcomes.
Although this list is not exhaustive of all the ways in which panel members change
footing illustrating the tensions of this double articulation, it does illustrate the more
common uses of this in this setting and allows us to think of this in terms of rhetorical
production. Here I have no intention of saying that when someone changed footing they
Convention