And here's hoping I can get through the next few days without having to write an obit for this site. I'll settle for just today.
I haven't been posting lately on Facebook, which is somehow more time-consuming for me than actually posting on Facebook. From time to time, there are just too many brawls going on there between people I know…friends calling one another assholes and psychotics or — and this insult seems to somehow be more toxic — wrong about something. Some of these are personal squabbles. Some are political. Most of the political ones start political and then effortlessly morph into personal.
Many of those I think are right, I think are like 80% to 90% right…but when arguments get emotional enough, there's no room for nuance, no way to admit that the other side is even slightly not full of crap about anything. This kind of polarization existed in this country B.T. (Before Trump) and it'll exist after he's a trivia question…but it somehow seems worse these days.
Speaking of Trump, as we all do too often: I wish some great, well-credentialed stand-up comedian would write an article explaining — for the few willing to listen to explanations about anything these days — that a surplus of anti-Trump jokes on the late-night shows is not necessarily an indication that the tellers of those jokes are conspiring to bring him down via ridicule. That may be a (nice) by-product but the real product is jokes and there are two reasons why there are so many of them about him…
Reason 1: Audiences laugh at them. Trump oughta get this and maybe he does and is pretending he doesn't. But almost everything in those "rally" speeches he gives is based on the simple premise that he says something and if his audiences cheer, he says it again and says more of it. In some cases, like with "Mexico's gonna pay for the wall," it got such a good reaction and was said so many times that now he's gotta figure out a way to make that happen in some fashion.
Clearly, he never had any idea how to do that; never dreamed he'd even have to when he first promised it. Still, at the time, it brought love and devotion from his crowds and that's all that mattered then. With comedians, all that matters really are laughs and if hammering Trump's going to bring them, that's reason enough for any comic.
Reason 2: They're easy to write. Real easy. Forgive the namedrop but Dick Van Dyke once asked me why people make so many jokes about his not-wonderful English accent in Mary Poppins. I told him the answer was simple: "It's about all they have on you. If I were ever hired to write lines for a Dick Van Dyke Roast, what else am I going to make fun of? You're not fat, you're not rude, you're not dumb, you're old but you don't act old…"
Comedy writers are always looking for the hook. Bill Clinton gave them plenty of hooks with his hornier exploits and his "I didn't inhale" line. George W. Bush gave them hooks aplenty by saying patently dumb things, choking on a pretzel, etc. Barack Obama didn't give them many. Most of the Obama jokes I've heard were based on something he really didn't do like being born in Kenya or allegedly offering to give everyone a free cellphone. That's why they weren't as good.
Trump is the Niagara Falls of joke hooks. You can do them about his hair, about his gut, about his contradictory statements, about his unpresidential insults, about his hands-off marriage to Melania, about his nepotism, about how often his staff members leave him, about how often they get indicted, about how his earlier wives left him, about his verbal gaffes, about all his failed businesses, about his bragging, about his narcissism, about inheriting money from his daddy, about his denials of things he was recorded saying, about his getting advice from Fox News, about his playing golf or watching TV all day, about his bragging about grabbing women, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
He may be the easiest public figure in history to write jokes about. And since so much of this country hates him, it's hard for anyone in the comedy business to resist. Look at Mr. Colbert's ratings since he started making his opening monologues 85% Trump-bashing. If Sean Hannity had to deliver a nightly monologue that would make a studio audience laugh, even he'd start ridiculing Trump.
I saw someone on some webpage say that in the interest of fairness — a thing people think is vital only when they feel someone's being unfair to them — there should be "balance." For every anti-Trump joke, there should be one joke trashing one of the Democratic candidates out to unseat him. That's a new rule being demanded by some who don't understand how comedy works.
First of all, not everyone is equally susceptible to mockery. If a politician is making a speech and he says something really stupid or his pants fall down, there are going to be more jokes about him the next day than there will be about some other politician who maintained his or her dignity. Secondly, every time you try to count jokes to gauge balance, you're going to be wrong. Not all jokes are equally demeaning to their subject. A joke about one candidate's ugly ties is not the same as a joke another candidate's tendency to lie, steal and/or molest.
But really it comes down to hooks — aspects of the subject on which to build jokes. Just try and write me a funny joke about Marianne Williamson or John Delaney right now. Most people don't know who they are, let alone what's funny about them, whereas everyone knows Trump's shortcomings. Eventually, we'll get to know one or two of the Democratic contenders well enough to write or appreciate jokes about them. But none of them will ever be as ripe for joking about as Donald Trump is. In our lifetimes, no public figure may ever lend him- or herself to that.