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
