Could a Wickedly Ribald Zinger Take Down Trump?

What if it was really, REALLY saucy?

Anti-Trump protesters in Scotland in 2018. (Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell via Getty)

How does a man attract a woman? That’s simple: Acquire. Goats. Acquire goats to signal that your farm is prosperous, and that a woman will not want for fig wine or turquoise-encrusted finery should she come to be under your roof. If you acquire the goats through battle, all the better, and be sure to place your enemies’ heads on spikes outside your hut so that all may know your prowess as a warrior. Chicks dig that.

You might be thinking: “Jeff, that advice seems pretty specific to ancient Mesopotamia — I’m not sure it applies today.” To which I say: Your racism against ancient Mesopotamians has gotten out of control — I have reported you to BlueSky, and their agents will be knocking on your door soon.

But I suppose I’ll allow that — in theory — something that works in one time and place might not work in another. And I’m willing to concede that point because I recently read a column by Nicholas Kristoff about how humor (and other actions) can undermine authoritarian governments. Kristoff cites the work of a political scientist named Gene Sharp, who recommended 198 nonviolent actions that activists can take against authoritarian rulers. Sharp’s work helped take down dictators in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and Kristoff believes that the same “tool kit” could work against Trump.

Humor is part of the tool kit, and a part that Kristoff thinks shows a lot of promise. “Humor puts autocrats in a difficult position,” he writes. “They look ridiculous if they crack down on jokes but look weak if they ignore them. What’s a dictator to do?” He cites examples of dictators bungling their responses to mocking protest, from Xi Jinping (reacted too much) to Slobodan Milosevic (reacted too little).

I don’t doubt that humor helped undermine those dictators (though I’ll point out that Xi Jinping is still in power and Slobodan Milosevic lost a war). But I question how much humor can do to undermine Trump. I feel like I’m well credentialed here: I’ve been a political comedian for two decades, I was one of the writers on the John Oliver “Drumpf” piece — I was in the room when “Drumpf” was coined! — and I remember the accolades from people who said that we “destroyed” or “decimated” Trump. That was before Trump became a two-term president, which suggests that perhaps he was not destroyed after all. And as much as I’d like to imagine that Trump could be toppled by a single, perfectly placed ribald jape — kind of like the Death Star being blown up by one highly accurate missile strike — I think there’s a reason why that won’t happen. And that reason is: Progressives be annoying as fuck.

Kristoff’s examples come from dictatorships where speech had been greatly curtailed. One example is from Belgrade in 2000, where passers-by took to whacking a picture of Milosevic with a bat, and the fact that they could do that and get away with it encouraged others to express their opposition to the government. That dynamic makes sense; few people will speak up if doing so earns you a one-way ticket to the gulag, but if speaking up allows you to assert yourself, join a protest, and — who knows? — maybe meet a cute girl there, get a little Les Mis-style excitement-of-the-moment hookup action, then a movement can grow quickly.

But that’s not the situation in the US today. For all of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, he has mostly ignored comedians. He’s used his power to shape news coverage by trying squelch the AT&T/Time Warner merger and by bullying CBS news — and that’s very bad — but comedians aren’t really his focus beyond the occasional dickish comment about Rosie O’Donnell. Kristoff assumes that dictators “look weak if they ignore [comedians]”, but that might only be true when a comedian commands a mass audience. At the moment, most anti-Trump comedians serve a narrow audience of wine moms and adjunct college professors, and their shows get drubbed in the ratings by WWE Monday Night Raw.

The fact that liberals produce anti-Trump content even when we’re the only ones watching is the crux of the problem. Because people understand: This shit is just for us. Bashing Trump is a thing we do for our own enjoyment, some of us wake up in the morning giddy at the prospect of being outraged by whatever Trump has done. Some of us also gain status by shaking our fist at Trump harder and better than anyone else, and a few of us — like me — have built careers as professional fist-shakers. An American comedian bashing Trump is not a trickle of water seeping through the dam, indicating that complete collapse is imminent; it’s what happens every day in some spaces, which is why nobody watches a Colbert segment and then runs to their friends and says “YOU GUYS…DID YOU KNOW THAT TRUMP IS BAD???”

Some anti-Trump comedy is pretty cringe-worthy. I won’t name names, I won’t provide links no matter how much pettiness compels me to, but suffice it to say that not every bit of anti-Trump comedy is worthy of an on-the-spot Mark Twain prize. At Last Week Tonight, activists inspired by our Drumpf piece would send us homemade anti-Trump trinkets; we’d get, like, a Trump toilet seat with a long note attached about how placing these toilet seats in strategic spots was the first step towards revolution. Not much anti-Trump comedy convinces people that a popular uprising is imminent, but a lot of it convinces people that liberals are self-righteous douchebags, and also makes them think that watching our heads explode when Trump wins again might be fun.

It’s also true that because the anti-Trump noise machine has been pegged to 11 for the past decade, everything he does gets lost in that noise and nothing breaks through. In an alternate universe, the president using trade policy to extort personal favors from Vietnam would be a presidency-ending scandal. In this universe, most Americans have never heard of that story. I don’t know what to do about this; the New York Times (and others) can’t just stop covering Trump and say “we’re going to shut up about him for a while so that when he does something really bad, you’ll notice” — that’s not a newspaper’s job. But we’re in a situation where more Trump coverage often plays to Trump’s advantage.

If there was currently no anti-Trump comedy in the US, I would agree that it might be a game changer for someone to boldly take the stage at Krazy Karl’s Laugh Lagoon and say “Did you ever notice that the president has a somewhat orange-ish hue?” But in our current context, I’m not sure humor does anything — there are certainly even times when it plays to Trump’s benefit. There are probably diminishing and even negative returns to Trump comedy as it increases — I’ve graphed this phenomenon below, in a chart that I have no choice but to call “The Laugher Curve”:

That feels pretty true. And at the moment, I’d guess that we’re right about here on the curve:

So, no: I don’t think that jokes will take down Trump. I’ll still make them, because making jokes is what I do, but I’m under no illusions that if I cook up a wisecrack with just the right amount of sass, insight, and bawdiness, Trump will lose power. Trump will lose power when people see Democrats as a better alternative, and that will happen when people stop seeing Democrats as performative, self-righteous dweebs. Encouraging liberals to amp up the comedy might be the same as encouraging them to amp up the self-righteous dweebery, and I really don’t think that will help.

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