Umeå University's logo

In recent years politicians have increasingly appeared in various types of entertainment media. For example, the President of the United States Joe Biden appeared on the talkshow The Late Late Show with James Corden. A notable example from 2022 is the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenkyy. He, who made his career as a comedian, became known as a political figure thanks to starring in the TV series Servant of the People. When he became president, the main focus from the Western media was that he was just that, a comedian. However, on February 24 2022, he was immortalized as the person who sat as president of Ukraine during the Russian invasion. The aim of this thesis is therefore to examine how the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, creates discourses in an entertainment interview during an ongoing war. The research questions for the essay are:

(1) What discourses about the war in Ukraine does Zelenskyy raise verbally and non-verbally in My Next Guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy?

(2) How does Volodymyr Zelenskyy build authenticity and trust through the interview verbally and non-verbally?

(3) What is the role of humor in communication about the war in Ukraine in the interview?

The material analyzed in the thesis is the episode My next guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy which is apart of David Letterman’s talkshow. Zelenskyy appeared in the thirty-minute interview in December of 2022 in Ukraine. The method used is multimodal discourse analysis and Fairclough's three-dimensional model. The results from the analysis present that the main discourse that Zelenskyj raises about the war is that Ukraine and Ukrainians are suffering and fighting to survive against Russia. With non-verbal communication, Zelenskyy succeeds in building trust and authenticity. As for humor, the analysis showed that it is important to use gallows humor to achieve resilience for the oppressed and that Zelenskyy can use satire to a certain extent in the interview. The main conclusion of the thesis is that Zelenskyy follows the conventions for a talkshow, however he differs from the classic talkshow format by speaking more about the Ukrainian people than himself.