How Comedy (Just Barely) Survived Trump

Cracking jokes when nothing was funny

- By Jesse David Fox

WHEN IT’S ALWAYS TOO SOON

BY JESSE DAVID FOX

if you ask comedians what their primary job is, they’ll say some version of “making people laugh.” Laughing makes people feel better, and comedians (because of myriad deep-seated psychological needs) really enjoy making people feel better. In turn, political comedy’s first goal is to make people feel better about politics. But what if it can’t? Donald Trump, as he did with many institutions of our culture, both tested and proved its limits.

Late-night shows are like very expensively produced sleep aids. Before they could take melatonin gummies, CBD gummies, and low-dose THC gummies (always gummies; Freud would have had a field day), people watched the jokes of a white man in a suit to help them wind down. Whether because of substance restrictions or habit, millions still do. If you read enough about the theory of jokemaking, it comes down to how jokes relieve conflict, tension, and ambiguity—the type of stuff that keeps a person awake. To help people process these feelings, topical humor’s primary tool is exaggeration—you make a terrible thing seem smaller by comparing it to the comically unbelievable. But as many comedians have explained to me, the problem with Trump is that he already is the logical, or even illogical, end point. There is no more room to exaggerate.

This was clearest when the behavior of Trump and his supporters rose to the level of crisis: Charlottesville, St. John’s Church, and so on.