by Ken Jennings
“Part of it is that our election cycle is so long,” comedy writer Rob Kutner told me. He wrote for The Daily Show for most of the Bush era, winning five Emmys. “It’s so boring. We’ve been stuck with these people for months and months, so we just go with the guy who’s the most entertaining.” Trump was certainly catnip for the news media, which couldn’t help but cover the hell out of a candidate who was saying something novel and outrageous literally every day. In the last months of the campaign, network news spent 64 percent more time on Trump than it did on Clinton.XIV But TV comedy is an especially big part of our reductive, short-attention-span political lens. Comedy privileges brevity, one-liners, an idea that can be tightly distilled and immediately understood by an audience, or else it fails. That’s fine for jokes about celebrities and sports teams, but when it comes to politics, it ceded the field to someone like Trump by abandoning policy entirely in favor of punch lines.
Over the last two decades, political jokes in late-night monologues have generally boiled down to a litany of repeated and near-identical premises about candidates. Bill Clinton is horny, George W. Bush is dumb, Bob Dole/John McCain is old, Al Gore is stiff, John Kerry is wishy-washy, Mitt Romney is square.XV (Obama was death to late night; there was no nonracist four-word pitch a studio audience could grab on to.) When Saturday Night Live asked Donald Trump to host their show in the middle of primary season, or when Jimmy Fallon goofed around good-naturedly with Trump’s comb-over, with no troubling mention of anything like mass deportations or serial harassment of women, there was a clear subtext. How could this be the most dangerous presidential candidate in over a century? the shows seemed to protest. He’s just a fun old white guy who’s a little bit wacky. You know, like Christopher Walken!
Rob Kutner called this the “Faustian bargain” of topical comedy: anytime you get someone to laugh about something, you might also be unwittingly making light of it, normalizing it. Lampooning the media, which has for many years been The Daily Show’s bread and butter, “blurs the line between news and entertainment, so news starts trying to be more entertaining.” Even hard-hitting, substantive jokes about government mostly serve to reinforce cynicism about politics, and that can both discourage participation in the democratic process and boost candidates with outsider cred, the kind who say they want to go after all those bozos in Washington.XVI All these tendencies played right into Donald Trump’s hands.
And it’s not as if late-night hosts don’t benefit when the more outrageous candidate, the better joke target, wins an election. As a silver lining, they’re getting four more years of great material. “That’s always the double-sided coin,” said Kutner, who was writing for The Daily Show when Bush beat Kerry in 2004. “Both things exist in contradictory fashion. Good for business . . .”
“Bad for the real world,” I finished.
“The Man” Who Laughs
Americans have always loved to see politicians let their hair down and tell self-deprecating jokes about themselves, thinking we were seeing their most human side. One hundred and fifty years ago, Lincoln was famous for making light of his rustic background and rough-hewn features. (Sample joke, when accused of being two-faced: “I leave it to my audience. If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”) But it’s remarkable how quickly politicians realized they could benefit by poking fun not at harmless foibles, but at their most serious and controversial Achilles’ heels. John F. Kennedy would make fun of his wealthy family’s reputation for political corruption, quoting his father as telling him, “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” Four years later, when Barry Goldwater’s political views were being painted as hopelessly old-fashioned and reactionary, he got out in front of the joke, telling crowds that if he lost the election, he could at least go write for The Flintstones or “18th Century Fox.” Election fraud and slashing Social Security aren’t funny topics to many voters—but that’s precisely why those candidates went there. It’s the same reason I told jokes at my own expense in fourth grade. In doing so, they inoculated themselves against criticism to some degree by preadministering the antibody of self-deprecation. Could this issue really be such a political liability, they were saying, if I’m willing to openly joke about it? In ancient Rome, Cicero recommended humor to the clever orator, because it very often “dispels extremely ugly matters that will not bear to be cleared up by proofs.” Sure enough, much political humor today is a calculated tool used to parry and deflect.
And when humanizing self-deprecation drifts to the CIA starting a “funny” Twitter account to soften its image (which debuted in June 2014 with the line “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet”—it’s funny because they’re so secretive!), it’s yet another reminder that everything subversive eventually gets subverted. Satire used to be our weapon against powerful institutions with little accountability. But if the CIA now has as many Twitter followers as John Oliver’s show, what do we have left? If you were fine with Obama joking about drone strikes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2010 because you think he’s a likable guy, ask yourself what you might think about Donald Trump or some successor using the same bully pulpit to get big laughs about invading Iran.
The Funniest of Times, the Unfunniest of Times
Aaron Sorkin has called Donald Trump “the end of political satire,” and though I don’t think the writer of The Newsroom is the best judge of what quality topical humor looks like today, I understand the sentiment. There’s a point at which you have to wonder how modernity supports comedy, because what are you even trying to expose anymore? Where’s the surprise? Donald Trump wasn’t your typical two-faced political hack. Sixty million people knew exactly who he was, mostly because he bragged endlessly about it, and they voted for him anyway. No sly SNL sketch or “epic” John Oliver takedown is going to change that. But take note that people have been writing satire’s obituary for at least half a century. In Tom Lehrer’s opinion, “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Conan O’Brien said essentially the same thing about the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the 1990s: “Clinton was wildly generous to the comedic mind. . . . He made our job so easy it was a challenge not to feel irrelevant.”XVII But somehow political humor soldiered on even when Vietnam took all the most absurd, horrifying exaggerations of pitch-black wartime satire and put them on the nightly news in living color, or when the lurid details of The Starr Report outshone a century of rumored political sex scandals, on page 1 above the fold.
Today, it’s possible for comedians to do more by doing less. In 2008, Seth Meyers and Tina Fey wrote a Saturday Night Live sketch lampooning a disastrous interview Sarah Palin had done with Katie Couric, one of the best gags was Fey-as-Palin giving a stumbling, incoherent answer to a question about bank bailouts. Most of the line was taken directly from the CBS Evening News transcript of Palin’s answers, and it still killed. And Jon Stewart’s Daily Show essentially invented a new kind of comedy where the satirist is the straight man, often doing no more than rolling a clip of an outrageous sound bite or media take and then turning to the camera in wide-eyed silence. As any boardwalk cartoonist will tell you, only attractive people are really hard to caricature. The funnier the face, the less work there is for the artist to do.
But for many funny people, professional and amateur alike, the more pressing and unprecedented problem was that Trump’s election put a pall on comedy altogether. Joking about his inadequacies had clearly failed, and had possibly even normalized him to the public. Joking about any other subject felt like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. (In this analogy, the captain of the Titanic is a shallow narcissist with no nautical training who doesn’t believe in icebergs.)
“How can there be mirth when the world is on fire?” the Buddha once asked his disciples. If he or they had an answer, history doesn’t relate it. In repealing Corwin’s Law, we created a culture where everyone is expected to be e
ntertained by politics all the time, and after we finally did it, when we finally voted in the showman whose candidacy had seemed the funniest, no one felt much like laughing at all.
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I. Louis IX, however, abstained from laughter on Fridays out of religious piety, as he was an incredibly devout Catholic. He was canonized after his 1270 death in the Crusades, and the city of St. Louis, Missouri, is one of many places still named for him.
II. In Corwin’s defense, portrait photography was seen as a formal occasion in his day, so almost everyone chose a look of stern disapproval when being immortalized. That tradition, together with the long, smile-unfriendly exposures of the daguerreotype period, has contributed to our modern misconception of the past as a miserable and humorless place, when it was merely a miserable one.
III. “Kyoo-ber.”
IV. Meader’s meteoric rise to fame ended abruptly on November 22, 1963. On his way to a gig in Wisconsin that night, a cabbie asked him, “Did you hear about Kennedy in Dallas?” “No,” Meader replied, “how does it go?” A few days later, Lenny Bruce took the stage for his first show after the assassination and paced back and forth for what seemed like an eternity before unleashing his opening joke: “Whew, Vaughn Meader is screwed!”
V. It’s a clear sign of the waning influence of Corwin’s Law that each political party’s last big presidential flameout—Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, respectively—was also its last unfunny president.
VI. In the interest of equal time, the show invited Nixon’s opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, to appear the following week. Humphrey said no, to his eternal regret.
VII. Or so she claimed. In fact, her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, wrote the sketch.
VIII. This may explain why Thatcher’s friend Ronald Reagan, despite his famous screen charisma and media connections, never descended to comic TV appearances: people already liked him. Or it may be that to a big-screen star of the studio era, entertainment television seemed too disposable and lightweight a medium for the president of the United States.
IX. Within two years, he was back on MTV telling a college student that he mostly wore briefs, not boxers, and millions of Clinton voters were surprised to find themselves suddenly thinking that maybe George Will had a point.
X. Conservative commentators and Republican critics like Rand Paul complained that the gag was everything wrong with Obama’s administration: nakedly partisan, more than a little patronizing. In response to the joke, McConnell tweeted out a goofy photo of himself at a bar gesturing to the empty stool next to him. McConnell has a beer, like a real American; he’s ordered a glass of red wine for the president.
XI. “Zach is always embarrassed to do the rude jokes,” said Aukerman, who always ended up playing bad cop from behind the camera. When he reassured Galifianakis that the White House had already vetted the “last black president” joke, the host still resisted. “Um, but he’ll be mad!”
XII. Yes, it can do more. But when someone asks about a comedy or a comedian, they’re not asking, “How incisive is the social commentary?” or “Is there a level of bittersweet yearning underlying the jokes?” They just want to know, “Will I laugh?”
XIII. Rubio was visibly uncomfortable adding the insult routine to his stump speech, telling the crowd almost apologetically, “I like debates about ideas . . . but you cannot have a policy debate with someone who has no policies.” Once one candidate breaks the glass on Corwin’s Law, it’s an arms race.
XIV. The coverage was largely negative, focusing on his scandals, but for a candidate like Trump, that turned out to be irrelevant.
XV. In 1996, this got so bad that David Letterman switched to metajokes about “Bob Dole is old” jokes. He would wander down to a special “Bob Dole Is Old” joke storeroom in the basement of the Ed Sullivan Theater to pick up a new batch, or have Paul Shaffer play a special fanfare for the show’s ten thousandth “Bob Dole is old” joke.
XVI. Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, the same political scientists who published the work on the counterintuitive effects of Colbert Report viewing, confirmed Kutner’s intuition in a 2006 article titled “The Daily Show Effect.” Jon Stewart’s viewers were significantly more cynical about politics on both sides of the aisle than non–Daily Show fans.
XVII. According to the databases of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, Bill Clinton was one of the three most-joked-about political figures on television for fifteen years running, from 1992 to 2006, an unprecedented achievement in American politics.
TEN
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WE SHALL OVERCOMB
On the evening of December 3, 2014, crowds gathered in lower Manhattan’s Foley Square to protest the death of Eric Garner, an asthmatic African American man killed in police custody. Earlier that day, a Staten Island grand jury had declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who had placed Garner in a fatal chokehold, in violation of NYPD policy. “I Can’t Breathe,” read many of the signs at the rally, a slogan taken from Garner’s own last words in the infamous cell phone video of his arrest.
One young woman held a sign with a longer message about not being able to breathe. “Telling me that I’m obsessed with talking about racism in America is like telling me I’m obsessed with swimming when I’m drowning,” it read. The quote, which had circulated widely online, came from Waiting for 2042, by a former Seattle immigration rights activist named Hari Kondabolu. The title of Waiting for 2042 refers to the year when the United States is projected to become a majority-minority country, and it’s been assigned as a text in curricula from high school to grad school for its insights on immigration and race. But Waiting for 2042 wasn’t a book of essays or a documentary or a TED talk. It was a live comedy record.
Kondabolu, a Queens-born American of Indian descent, drifted from activism into stand-up in his twenties. His debut album didn’t feel like a political treatise—it had long chunks about Weezer, Back to the Future, and Matthew McConaughey. But in just fifty-six minutes, it also managed to touch on topics like global warming, the public option for health insurance, interracial adoption, Guantánamo, model-minority stereotypes, Hillary Clinton, the English-only movement, religious homophobia, white privilege, straight privilege, and, yes, police brutality.I It’s unfailingly funny, but these aren’t funny topics.
When I asked him about the record, Kondabolu resisted the notion that his new day job in comedy is a continuation of his activism. “If you start viewing it as activist work, it’s not going to be good. The goals are different. The goal of the activist is to create a change that they want to see. For the comedian, if you have that activism lens, you lose the ability to communicate to a broader group of people.” The subtext was clear: Please, for the love of God, don’t make me sound like a guy with a cause and a clipboard. That doesn’t seem funny at all! Even on the album, after he delivers the “obsessed with swimming” line, he undercuts it. “And that was the slam poetry section of the show,” he says, apparently uncomfortable with ending the bit on a note of such earnestness and anger. Throughout, he’s careful to structure jokes to avoid what Seth Meyers called “clapter”: the applause that can follow a lame nonjoke that an audience happens to agree with politically.
Protest signs have not, historically, been a real hotbed of comedy. The civil rights marchers of the 1960s traded in the kind of quiet dignity needed to persuade a skeptical America of the righteousness of their movement. “All Men Are Created Equal.” “We Shall Not Be Moved.” “We Shall Overcome.” The Vietnam protests were angrier and aimed to shock. “Hell No We Won’t Go.” “LBJ Is a War Criminal!” “Heil Nixon!” But something was different about the protest signs of the Trump era. Despite the protesters’ conviction that this was every bit as critical and turbulent a time as the 1960s, the signs were now funny. The slogans weren’t all borrowed from stand-up routines, but they felt like lines that had been workshopped by a room of comedy writers, not scrawled by dorm rooms full of rabble-rousers.
; • Trump Eats Pizza with a Fork
• Orange Will Never Be the New Black
• Build a Wall Around Trump, I’ll Pay for It
• Not Usually a Sign Guy but Geez
• I’ve Seen Better Cabinets at Ikea
• We Gave You Hummus, Have Some Respect
• I Know Signs, I Make the Best Signs. They’re Terrific. Everyone Agrees.
• Free Melania
Yes, these were in part the fruit of social media. College kids and annoyed urbanites making signs could now consult hundreds of online photos of other protests and cherry-pick the best slogans—an option not available in 1968. The Internet was also a powerful incentive to be creative in your march prep. If your sign was funny enough and your six-year-old was cute enough, you might just go viral!II
But they were also a symptom of how fast the culture was changing. Social protest was borrowing the language of comedy, because comedy was quickly absorbing the concerns of social protest.
