It was all had to be a joke: the escalator descent before his speech, the denouncements of Mexicans. Many laughed in disbelief as the shepherd of the Birther Movement against President Obama was now declaring his intention to fill those shoes. A TV mogul, a real-estate mogul, and as we learned during the campaign, a sexual assault mogul, were all on the resume of a potential president of the United States. The man even branded his own hats. Funny, right?
Two months into his presidency and the reality is far from a joke for many. The man no one took seriously now holds the collective fear and anxiety of those very people in his hands. And while the reality of President Trump has nipped the seeming joke of his candidacy in the bud, the man himself has also nipped conventional political satire and comedy in the bud, forcing both to take a hard look at one themselves.
It wasn’t impossible to see coming. In fact, one of Trump’s first victims is one of the U.S.’ greatest current satirists: Stephen Colbert. In his September 2015 interview with Trump, the then-new “Late Show” host approached it with visible amusement and flippancy. It resulted in a bland interview where Colbert lobbed easy jokes for a very calm, unprovoked Trump to bat away. Trump was in sharp contrast to his character who belted out extreme rhetoric at rallies. While many of us didn’t take Trump seriously, it was clear that he did.
Two months later Trump hosts "Saturday Night Live." His opening monolog said it all: though he was in SNL’s court where they intended to have him deliver self-defacing jokes about himself (mocking him being “the best,” making something “the greatest”), he delivered those words as promises and nullifying any humor that Saturday Night Live was attempting. It was the art of the deal and Trump had clearly come away with the better part of the deal.
Jimmy Fallon in September 2016 jostles Trump’s hair, making a man wielding vitriolic words appear as harmless as a 5-year-old. It proved something very shocking: that Donald Trump’s hair was in-fact real and not a toupee. More important, though, is that it proved that Fallon’s brand of humor is in over its head with Trump. Fallon’s show airs on the side of partisanship and is more about having fun than taking a side. The problem is that Donald Trump is not partisan: he exacerbates anger and makes it almost impossible to joke about him without condemning or praising him.
“Veep” had to cancel a joke that involved pussy-grabbing that showrunner David Mandel said was written before the “Access Hollywood”/Billy Bush leak. Several authors talk about losing ideas of satiric stories they were writing to the reality of Trump’s almost-satiric bid for the presidency. Even I ran into a similar instance: after the horrific shooting in the Florida nightclub “Pulse” I thought “The most ridiculous thing Donald Trump could say is that the only thing that could have saved the dancers would have been that they carry assault rifles on their persons in the club.” Trump, the day after, on CNN: “If you had some guns in that club the night that this took place, if you had guns on the other side, you wouldn’t have had the tragedy that you had.” Dang-it.
Donald Trump says in his opening monolog on SNL that he can take a joke. The unamused glare from him a sea of laughter at Seth Meyer’s take-down during the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner shows how little room he actually leaves for humor about himself. Satire is meant to lampoon a situation by portraying its hyper-seriousness until it looks ridiculous to the viewer. The problem is, Trump has already beaten us to the super-serious punch himself. He has total and unyielding confidence in what he does, at least in public. So where does that leave comedy?
To me there are two goals of comedy: to point out the absurd and to show that we are share similar problems. Two years later and comedy has pointed out the absurdity of Donald Trump to those that see him as such. Exhaustively. At this point, we all have our opinion on the man. It’s hard to be undecided about him at this point, so does ANOTHER sketch where he praises himself and ignores minorities accomplish anything besides allowing the writers to feel a sense of affirmation in their own views? An anti-Trumper will watch these sketches and take away what they already know: “I don’t agree with this man, he doesn’t represent me, please get him out.” Someone who supports Trump watches that sketch and is just reinforced what they believe: the anti-Trumpers are waging war against their ideals and their president and treat them all as the butt of a joke. After the 2016 election, political pundits harped about the stratification of the political parties in the United States. Many of the “jokes” being made about Trump in mainstream comedy today just add to that miasma.
And therein lies the problem: we’re in a time where identity politics reign supreme and both sides are in contentious war with one another for total victory. At least, that’s the voice that gets pumped into our ears every day by many media outlets. This is seeping into comedy, making much of our political humor about being right, not about being funny and exploitative.
I believe that is in sharp contrast to the second goal of comedy: unite people in the realization of shared problems. Donald Trump is only a shared problem to his opponents. To his supporters, he’s a breath of fresh air from the swamp they see as having overrun Washington.
Comedy isn’t about compromise. It’s about a clearly-defined world that overrules any other reality. The political system in this country, ideally, IS about compromise. It hasn’t been, and maybe that’s that’s the real joke in all this: we’re too serious about ourselves.
Imagine a satiric story where two sides are in opposition: one believes that you poop out of your mouth while the other believes it comes out of your belly-button. They believe their side SO MUCH they go to war with one another, despite the fact that the mouth-poopers and belly-button poopers share the same church, have kids in the same school district, and share a laugh over the absurd weather they’re having as they walk outside to get the Sunday paper. They read the same Sunday paper, too. But all of this doesn’t matter because while each side is so committed to fighting for what they believe, they don’t see that it actually comes out of their butts. Their blindness causes them to wage a war that’s only ended by total destruction of one-another, the last person alive raises their hand to the sky and screams, a final crap coming out of their butts as they realized their own error.
You know what each side in that analogy can agree on? A funny instance where they had to poop at a time when it was inappropriate to do so. I can name one myself: I once had under-cooked chicken for dinner and the next day I woke up feeling sick as a dog. I rolled out of bed and in the living room were my friend’s parents who were there to celebrate his birthday. I walked by them to go outside to get the mail and, as I bent over to get the mail, the symptoms of my undercooked food escaped out the back. After collecting the mail, I had to shuffle past my friend’s parents to toss the pants in the bathtub where I washed them, bleached our bathtub, and then had a 20 minute conversation with my friend’s parents and pretended I hadn’t in-fact stewed my trousers on the front porch. Probably not a pleasant joke or even a very fun one, but here’s the thing: in the act of sharing it none of you realized that I believe my poop comes out of my ears.
There is still room for comedy in our politics. Don’t ask me where I just made a poop joke for goodness sakes. But I do believe that if we don’t start using comedy as a unifier it will only drive us further apart. We need satire and we need political humor. But we also need to rise to these very challenging political times and make thoughtful jokes, not easy ones. We have to ask ourselves if we want to be right or if we want to work with one another.
A list of things we all still laugh at: lousy bosses, romantic anxiety, that one guy at Subway who never knows what he wants on his sandwich, pets with formal names like “Bartholomew” or “Mr. Whiskers”, a kid burping during church, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (should I just be saying “Dwayne Johnson”?), not knowing what to call Dwayne Johnson, the “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up” video, Kanye West’s blonde hair, Bill Murray, Canada jokes, and that none of this actually matters because we all end up dying some-day no matter how loud we scream.
