How Jokes Won the Election

• By Emily Nussbaum, www.newyorker.com
•  
•  
•  
• “Wait a minute—this podcast is coming from inside the house!”
•  
•  
  Since November 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes—dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity. Growing up a Jewish kid in the nineteen-seventies, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—that meant freedom for everyone.
  
  
  But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur. Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual comedy, on both the right and the left—and every combination of the four was labelled “satire.” In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as payback for a comedy routine: Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?
  
  
  Obama’s act—his public revenge for Trump’s birtherism—was a sophisticated small-club act. It was dry and urbane, performed in the cerebral persona that made Obama a natural fit when he made visits to, say, Marc Maron’s podcast or Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” In contrast, Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He was the insult comic, the stadium act, the ratings-obsessed headliner who shouted down hecklers. His rallies boiled with rage and laughter, which were hard to tell apart. You didn’t have to think that Trump himself was funny to see this effect: I found him repulsive, and yet I could hear those comedy rhythms everywhere, from the Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” routine to the gleeful insult-comic slams of Don Rickles (for “hockey puck,” substitute “Pocahontas”) to Andrew Dice Clay, whose lighten-up-it’s-a-joke, it’s-not-him-it’s-a-persona brand of misogyny dominated the late nineteen-eighties. The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.
  
  
  Like that of any stadium comic, Trump’s brand was control. He was superficially loose, the wild man who might say anything, yet his off-the-cuff monologues were always being tweaked as he tested catchphrases (“Lock her up!”; “Build the wall!”) for crowd response. On TV and on Twitter, his jokes let him say the unspeakable and get away with it. “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening—I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” he told reporters in July, at the last press conference he gave before he was elected. Then he swept his fat palm back and forth, adding a kicker: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
  
  
  It was a classically structured joke. There was a rumor at the time that Russia had hacked the D.N.C. At the same time, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from when she was Secretary of State—which were stored on a private server—were under scrutiny. Take two stories, then combine them: as any late-night writer knows, that’s the go-to algorithm when you’re on deadline. When asked about the remark, on Fox News, Trump said that he was being “sarcastic,” which didn’t make sense. His delivery was deadpan, maybe, but not precisely sarcastic.
  
  
  But Trump went back and forth this way for months, a joker shrugging off prudes who didn’t get it. He claimed that his imitation of the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski was a slapstick take on the reporter “grovelling because he wrote a good story.” (“Grovelling,” like “sarcastic,” felt like the wrong word.) He did it when he said that Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever”—a joke, he insisted, and he actually meant her nose. “I like people who weren’t captured,” about John McCain: that had the shape of a joke, too.
  
  
  The Big Lie is a propaganda technique: state false facts so outlandish that they must be true, because who would make up something so crazy? (“I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”) But a joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy. It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast. “Buh-leeve me, buh-leeve me!” Trump said in his act, again and again. Lying about telling the truth is part of the joke. Saying “This really happened!” creates trust, even if what the audience trusts you to do is to keep on tricking them, like a magician reassuring you that while his other jokes are tricks, this one is magic.
  
  
  It could be surprisingly hard to look at the phenomenon of Trump directly; the words bent, the meaning dissolved. You needed a filter. Television was Trump’s natural medium. And television had stories that reflected Trump, or predicted his rise—warped lenses that made it easier to understand the change as it was happening.
  
  
  No show has been more prescient about how far a joke can go than “South Park.” Its co-creators, the nimble libertarian tricksters Trey Parker and Matt Stone, could sense a tide of darkness that liberal comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee could not, because “South Park” liked to ride that wave, too. For two decades, “South Park,” an adult animated show about dirty-mouthed little boys at a Colorado school, had been the proud “anti-political-correctness” sitcom. Season 19, which came out in 2015, was a meta-meditation on P.C., and, by the season’s end, one of the characters, Mr. Garrison, was running for President on a platform of “fucking immigrants to death.” There was also a Canadian President who emerged as “this brash asshole who just spoke his mind,” the show explained. “He didn’t really offer any solutions—he just said outrageous things. We thought it was funny. Nobody really thought he’d ever be President. It was a joke! But we just let the joke go on for too long. He kept gaining momentum, and by the time we were all ready to say, ‘O.K., let’s get serious now—who should really be President?,’ he was already being sworn into office.”
  
  
  Yet, as Season 20 opened, the show was doing precisely what a year earlier it had warned against: treating Garrison’s Trump as an absurd, borderline-sympathetic joke figure, portraying him and Clinton as identical dangers, a choice between a “giant douche” and a “turd sandwich.” Beneath that nihilism, however, “South Park” was onto something both profound and perverse. The fight between Trump and Clinton, it argued, could not be detached from the explosion of female comedy: it found its roots in everything from the female-cast “Ghostbusters” reboot to the anti-feminist GamerGate movement. Trump’s call to Make America Great Again was a plea to go back in time, to when people knew how to take a joke. It was an election about who owned the mike.
  
  
  In one plot, the father of one of South Park’s little boys is a misogynist troll who gets recruited by a global anonymous online army; in another, the boys and girls at the school split into man-hating feminists and woman-hating “men’s rights” activists. Meanwhile, an addictive snack called Member Berries—they whisper “ ’Member? ’Member?”—fills the white men of the town with longing for the past, mingling “Star Wars” references with “ ’Member when there weren’t so many Mexicans?” Mr. Garrison, as “Trump,” rides this wave of white male resentment and toxic nostalgia. But the higher he rises the more disturbed he is by the chaos he’s unleashed. Desperate to lose, he imagines that if he finally offends his followers they won’t vote for him.
  
  
  Halfway through the season, Mr. Garrison’s Trump appeared as a standup comic. As the crowd chants “Douche! Douche! Douche!,” he struts onstage with a microphone, as cocky as Dane Cook. “So I’m standing in line at the airport, waitin’ in security because of all the freakin’ Muslims,” he begins, and then, when his fans hoot in joy, he tries for something nastier. “And the T.S.A. security people all look like black thugs from the inner city, and I’m thinking, Oh, good, you’re gonna protect us?” When racist jokes get only bigger laughs, he switches to gags about sticking his fingers into women’s butts and their “clams.” Finally, some white women walk out. “Where did I lose you, honey?” he taunts them from the stage. “You’ve been O.K. with the ‘Fuck ’Em All to Death’ and all the Mexican and Muslim shit, but fingers in the ass did it for you. Cool. Just wanted to see where your line was.”
  
  
  As prescient as “South Park” could be, it clearly counted on Clinton’s winning: a dirty boy requires a finger-wagging mom. After Election Day, the writers quickly redid the show, and the resulting episode, “Oh, Jeez,” exuded numbness and confusion. “We’ve learned that women can be anything, except for President,” one character tells his wife and daughter. There were things “South Park” had always had trouble imagining: it was complex and dialectical on male anger and sadness, and able to gaze with empathy into the soul of a troll, but it couldn’t create a funny girl or a mother who wasn’t a nag. What it did get, however, was how dangerous it could be for voters to feel shamed and censored—and how quickly a liberating joke could corkscrew into a weapon.
  
  
  In November, shortly after the host of “The Apprentice” was elected President, the troubled starlet Tila Tequila—herself a former reality-TV star, one whose life had become a sad train wreck—blinked back onto the gossip radar. Now she was a neo-Nazi. On her Twitter account, she posted a selfie from the National Policy Institute conference, an “alt-right” gathering, where she posed, beaming a sweet grin, her arm in a Hitler salute. The caption was a misspelled “sieg heil.” Her bio read “Literally Hitler!”
  
  
  It was an image that felt impossible to decode, outside the sphere of ordinary politics. But Literal Hitler was an inside joke, destabilizing by design; as with any subcultural code, from camp to hip-hop, it was crafted to confuse outsiders. The phrase emerged on Tumblr to mock people who made hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler, often ones about Obama. Then it morphed, as jokes did so quickly last year, into a weapon that might be used to mock any comparisons to Hitler—even when a guy with a serious Hitler vibe ran for President, even when the people using the phrase were cavorting with Nazis. Literal Hitler was one of a thousand such memes, flowing from anonymous Internet boards that were founded a decade ago, a free universe that was crude and funny and juvenile and anarchic by design, a teen-age-boy safe space. The original version of this model surfaced in Japan, on the “imageboard” 2chan. Then, in 2003, a teen-ager named Christopher Poole launched 4chan—and when the crudest users got booted they migrated to 8chan, and eventually to Voat.co. For years, those places had mobbed and hacked their ideological enemies, often feminists, but they also competed for the filthiest, most outrageous bit, the champion being whatever might shock an unshockable audience. The only winning move was not to react.
  
  
  In “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” two writers for Breitbart mapped out the alt-right movement as a patchwork of ideologies: there were “the Intellectuals,” “the Natural Conservatives,” men’s-rights types, earnest white supremacists and anti-Semites (whom the authors shrug off as a humorless minority), and then the many invisible others—the jokers, the virtual writers’ room, punching up one another’s gags. In Breitbart’s take, this was merely payback for the rigidity of identity politics. “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything—an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world,” the article states. “Because it is.”
  
  
  Two thousand sixteen was the year that those inside jokes were released in the wild. Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on “South Park,” who were eagerly “shit-posting” on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the “rat-fucking” that used to be the province of paid fixers. Like Trump’s statements, their quasi-comical memeing and name-calling was so destabilizing, flipping between serious and silly, that it warped the boundaries of discourse. “We memed a President into existence,” Chuck Johnson, a troll who had been banned from Twitter, bragged after the election. These days, he’s reportedly consulting on appointments at the White House.
  
  
  Last September, Donald Trump, Jr., posted on Instagram an image of Trump’s inner circle which included a cartoon frog in a Trump wig. It was Pepe the Frog, a benign stoner-guy cartoon that had been repurposed by 4chan pranksters—they’d Photoshopped him into Nazi and Trump drag, to mess with liberals. Trump trolls put Pepe in their avatars. But then so did literal Nazis and actual white supremacists. Like many Jewish journalists, I was tweeted images in which my face was Photoshopped into a gas chamber—but perhaps those were from free-speech pranksters, eager to spark an overreaction? It had become a distinction without a difference. The joke protected the non-joke. At the event that Tila Tequila attended, the leader shouted “Heil Trump!”—but then claimed, in the Trumpian manner, that he was speaking “in a spirit of irony.” Two weeks ago, the Russian Embassy tweeted out a smirking Pepe. The situation had begun to resemble an old story from the original fake-news site, the Onion: “Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation.”
  
  
  There’s a scene in the final season of “Mad Men” in which Joan and Peggy, former secretaries, have risen high enough to be paired as a creative team. It’s 1970; the feminist movement has the pull to be threatening. (Earlier, it was a punch line: “We’ll have a civil-rights march for women,” Peggy’s left-wing boyfriend, Abe, said, laughing.) They sit at a conference table to meet their new bosses, three frat-boy suits from McCann Erickson. “Well, you’re not the landing party we expected,” one of them says.
  
  
  The account is Topaz pantyhose, a competitor of the newly global L’Eggs. “So they’re worried that L’Eggs are going to spread all over the world?” one man says with a leer. “That wouldn’t bother me at all.” It’s a joke delivered past the women to the other men, who chuckle and make eye contact. Peggy and Joan smile politely. It goes on like that: the women’s pitches slam against a wall, because the men are one another’s true audience. “Would you be able to tell them what’s so special about your panties?” they ask Joan. She can be crude or elegant, she can ignore them, or she can be a “good sport.” But every path, she knows from experience, leads to humiliation
  .
  Afterward, Joan and Peggy stand in the elevator, fuming. “I want to burn this place down,” Joan says. They have an argument—they fight about Peggy being homely and Joan hot, how each of them dresses and why. The argument has the same premise as the jokes: how men see you is all that matters. Knowing what’s wrong doesn’t mean you know how to escape it.
  
  
  I thought of that scene the first time I saw the “Access Hollywood” tape, the one that was supposed to wreck Trump’s career, but which transformed, within days, on every side, into more fodder for jokes: a chance to say “pussy” out loud at work; the “Pussy Grabs Back” shirt I wore to the polls. In the tape, Billy Bush and Trump bond like the guys at McCann Erickson, but it’s when they step out of the bus to see the actress Arianne Zucker that the real drama happens. Their voices change, go silky and sly, and suddenly you could see the problem so clearly: when you’re the subject of the joke, you can’t be in on it.
  
  
  The political journalist Rebecca Traister described this phenomenon to me as “the finger trap.” You are placed loosely within the joke, which is so playful, so light—why protest? It’s only when you pull back—show that you’re hurt, or get angry, or try to argue that the joke is a lie, or, worse, deny that the joke is funny—that the joke tightens. If you object, you’re a censor. If you show pain, you’re a weakling. It’s a dynamic that goes back to the rude, rule-breaking Groucho Marx—destroyer of élites!—and Margaret Dumont, pop culture’s primal pearl-clutcher.
  
  
  When Hillary described half of Trump’s followers as “deplorables,” she wasn’t wrong. But she’d walked right into the finger trap. Trump was the hot comic; Obama the cool one. Hillary had the skill to be hard-funny, too, when it was called for: she killed at the Al Smith charity dinner, in New York, while Trump bombed. It didn’t matter, though, because that was not the role she fit in the popular imagination. Trump might be thin-skinned and easily offended, a grifter C.E.O. on a literal golden throne. But Hillary matched the look and the feel of Margaret Dumont: the rich bitch, Nurse Ratched, the buzzkill, the no-fun mom, the one who shut the joke down.
  
  
  On “The Waldo Moment,” an episode of the British show “Black Mirror,” a miserable comic named Jamie is the voice behind Waldo, an animated blue bear, whose specialty is humiliating public figures. His act is scatological and wild, in the tradition of Ali G and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, as well as the meaner correspondents on “The Daily Show.” It’s ambush comedy, taking the piss. But Jamie’s bosses, hip nihilists with their eye on the bottom line, see greater potential for profit—online, an act like Waldo can go viral, jumping live from phone to phone.
  As a gag, they run Waldo for Parliament, just as Colbert once started his own satirical super PAC. Jamie has no true politics—“I’m not dumb or clever enough to be political,” he protests—but his crude attacks take off. He becomes a populist sensation, like Trump: he’s the joke that’s impossible to fight. The politicians he’s attacking are required to be serious, both the Tory stuffed shirt and the young female Labour upstart, who is dryly funny in private but can’t risk showing it in public. A blue bear doesn’t need to follow rules, however. Since Waldo attacks phonies—and is open about his own phonyness, including the fact that he’s a team effort—viewers find him authentic. Even a brilliantly acerbic chat-show interrogator can’t unseat him, because Jamie’s got so much more bandwidth. He’s allowed to curse, to be stupid, to be angry—the fight is fixed in his favor, because all the emotion belongs to him.
  
  
  “The Waldo Moment” came out in 2013. By then, viewers had spent years getting their news delivered via comedy, and vice versa. Jon Stewart was two years from retirement; Colbert would soon jump to CBS. Newspapers, starved of print ads, had died years before—or been shoved into the attention economy, where entertainment mattered most. Online, all clicks were equal. Breitbart got traffic off quasi-comical headlines; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones screamed on his livestream like Sam Kinison. It was no great leap for paranoid delusions, like Pizzagate, or deliberate hoaxes, like the one about the Pope endorsing Trump, to pass muster on Facebook, because the design made all news-like items feel fungible. On both the left and the right, the advertising imperative was stronger than the ethical one: you had to check the URL for an added “.co” to see if a story was real, and how many people bothered? If some readers thought your story was a joke and others thought it was outrageous, well, all the better. Satire was what got traffic on Saturday night.
  
  
  Like “South Park,” “Black Mirror” could see far, but not all the way to the end. Waldo, who has come in second in the election, gets acquired by sinister global-capitalist forces, which recognize that his Pepe-goofy image is the ideal mask for fascist power. As a militarized police force rousts homeless people from an alley, Waldo gleams from billboards, his message having pivoted to “Hope.” When the episode came out, it was divisive: some viewers found it overly cynical in its portrait of the mob. Now it seems naïve: the creators did not imagine that Waldo might win—or that the person controlling him might want to win. Like Mr. Garrison, like the shysters in “The Producers,” Jamie tries desperately to escape the prank persona that he’s created. But when he shrieks “Don’t vote for me!” the audience only laughs; when he flees the van in which he’s performing, his boss takes over the voice of Waldo. It’s only when Jamie threatens to disrupt the show, attacking the screen on which Waldo appears, and the blue bear orders the crowd to beat him up, that people stop laughing.
  
  
  When Vladimir Putin was elected President, in 2000, one of his first acts was to kill “Kukly,” a sketch puppet show that portrayed him as Little Tsaches, a sinister baby who uses a “magic TV comb” to bewitch a city. Putin threatened to wreck the channel, NTV, unless it removed the puppet. NTV refused. Within months, it was under state control. According to Newsweek, “Putin jokes quickly vanished from Russia’s television screens.”
  
  
  Soon after Trump was elected, he, too, began complaining about a sketch show: “Saturday Night Live,” which portrayed him as a preening fool, Putin’s puppet. His tweets lost the shape of jokes, unless you count “not!” as a kicker. He was no longer the blue bear. Instead, he was reportedly meeting with Rupert Murdoch about who should head the F.C.C. Soon, Trump would be able to shape deals like the A.T. & T. and Time Warner merger, to strike back at those who made fun of him or criticized him, which often amounted to the same thing. Fox would likely be Trump TV.
  
  
  Last week, at his first press conference as President-elect, Trump made no jokes. He was fuming over the BuzzFeed dossier and all those lurid allegations worthy of “South Park,” the pee jokes lighting up Twitter. Only when he reminisced about his rallies did he relax, recalling their size, the thrill of the call and response. He almost smiled. But when CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask a question about Russia, Trump snapped back, furiously, “Fake news!”—and the incoming White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told Acosta that if he tried that again he’d be thrown out. Now, it seems, is when Trump gets serious. A President pushes buttons in a different sense. As Putin once remarked to a child, “Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere”—before adding, “That’s a joke.” ♦
  
  NEW YORKER, JANUARY 2017