I think jokes about a person's appearance are like jokes about their name. It's not that they're not funny or clever, it's just extraordinarily unlikely that you're the first person to come up with it.
I would say, joke about their appearance when it's relevant to the main joke. Eg, if Trump puts a tariff on oranges, then a joke about how he's orange himself can help a bigger joke along (obviously the punchline shouldn't just be he's orange, because that's not funny).
Bottom line, appearance jokes are likely to be lazy and overdone.
I like the "if they did this to themselves, mock it" guideline. Another example in the vein of Noem: my wife watches that 90-Day Fiancé show, and the other day while I was making myself something to eat, she had it on. I looked up and audibly yelped when I saw that Darcy woman on the screen. She looks terrifying, and she looks terrifying because she pumped a Ganges River-worth of plastic into her face. That deserves to be mocked, if only to discourage other people from making an equally or more terrible decision for themselves.
I don't think this discussion was held in the writers' room at SNL, for example. Mitch McConnell is an unfortunate-looking 83 year old man, and I don't think he 'did' anything to himself. But they went mean and hard at his appearance every week for years because they didn't like his politics. It's not a stretch to write mean jokes about, say, Maxine Waters' ghastly countenance, but she's One of Us, so off limits.
I agree with Frantic Pedantic's interpretation of SOME of the McConnell jokes, but I also think you're right that some of them are just "he looks like a turtle". And I won't pretend that I've never laughed at a McConnell turtle joke, but my many years as a comedy writer did make me think "what are the rules"? And you've put your finger on the thing I only hinted at in this article: For some comedy writers, anything goes with old, Republican men.
I actually think the nadir for this type of thing was circa 2019, and more writers are figuring out "PERSONALITY = fair game, APPEARANCE = not so much".
What about something like “Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh”?
On the one hand, the joke falls into the “mean, not his fault” category. On the other, at this point the humor comes less from his actual appearance than from the fact that he was apparently so self-conscious about it that the government banned Winnie the Pooh from China, which is a hilariously absurd overreaction that makes me want to post “Xi is Pooh” memes everywhere.
The fact that he really does look like a turtle aside, I think most of the jokes were more along the lines of “Mitch McConnell, seen here watching [a cute animal have something horrible happen]…” That’s not quite an appearance joke; it’s more directly about him seeming heartless because of his politics.
You have to move the joke along. McConnell the turtle, we strongly urge you to get another shirt. We'll give you a week to reach the closet. ca-ching! It's a quick bit, but it's no longer "one note" about his appearance.
Jokes about appearance seem to have become a progressive comedy trope -- particularly John Oliver. Make fun of how a disfavored person looks at the top of the bit, audience laughs (they hate that person anyway), proceed to mock the subject because of that "proof of why they're disfavored" thing they did. To some extent, the person's appearance is used to justify the ridicule.
If at least ‘punching down’ as a concept dies before I do, I’ll be content.
My general thesis is that whether a joke crosses the line is almost entirely dependent on the delivery and the audience, rather than the broad content of the joke or its target.
People can say the most appalling things about the most vulnerable groups of people and everybody loves them, but something innocuous in comparison (like a fat joke) delivered nastily and in front of the wrong people, for instance, can be relationship destroying.
Agree with the “if they did it to themselves” ground rule. I seem to recall Joan Rivers making a lot of plastic surgery jokes—mostly about herself—but pretty sure she did the same to others. My favorite joke of hers is “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, that when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”
This seems broadly correct, except it’s worth considering that women are coerced more than men to make themselves look certain ways. The per-se penalty for aging is much higher in particular, which drives many of them to plastic surgery and fillers that over time begin to look uncanny. If everyone adhered to the rule that you don’t mock or devalue people for naturally aging, this would be mooted, but nobody’s going to do that.
Journalisms often trafficks in "jokes" about the physical appearance of conservative women by printing highly unflattering photos of them. Tulsi Gabbard is a very attractive woman but it seems the media does its best, when running negative stories about her, to use photos that highlight her acne scars. Make the monsters look like monsters....
I think this is a prevalent media tactic not exclusive to conservative women, nor conservatives in general, and is done very much more to attract reader attention than to "make the monsters look like monsters" based on some ideological / political basis.
It would be hard to make the guy look like much of anything other than what he is, but there's a myriad of "unflattering" photos of Trump with facial expressions that make him look much worse than his normal appearance rather than better, physically speaking. And there has been a plethora of unflattering Hilary (and then later) Biden pics.
And the list goes on extensively, on both sides of the aisle. A 'negative' story seems to usually rate an at least *less-than-flattering* pic, regardless of who the subject is. This seems to be encoded into the DNA of the media's M.O. Because while the media can be - and indeed is at times - biased, its real ideology is capitalism and the profit it produces, which is always well-served by negativity of most any kind, including visual.
It's a sign of bad journalism to use an unflattering picture of someone. It's the sign you're dealing with a hack. You can *always* get a bad frame of someone.
... I remember seeing the Wikipedia article for Donald Trump, and looking at the picture thinking "oh those fucking Wikipedia editors, of course they pick something that makes him look evil" .... but, no, it really was honest-to-God his official portrait.
Yeah. And if you go to Wikipedia (or anywhere else) and look at his honest-to-God 2023 mugshot from the Fulton County, Georgia jail alongside his official inaugural portrait, I'd think it's fair to say that the White House could have quite easily skipped Daniel Torok and his fee altogether, photoshopped a different color tie, added a lapel pin and the Old Glory background, washed out his complexion and called it good, thus saving the taxpayers quite a tidy little sum, I would imagine.
This is definitely not the case -- yes, you can get a bad frame, but most politicians are trained to reduce the severity of their worst frame. They look plastic. Trump doesn't because he hasn't had that training. You get him with half-lidded eyes, making a weird half grin-grimace.
And Trump's not all that stiff and weird of a guy, either (compare to Elon Musk, who makes weird faces when he's trying to look good for pictures).
Good points. I think there is, however, a current focus on what they're calling "the Trump face" of some of the women in Trump's circle who've had extensive plastic surgery. But, as per your note, they do the same to Hollywood actresses.
For me, the big problem with the Kristi Noem joke is that it's incoherent — allergic swelling wouldn't make all that filler deflate, it would make it worse.
That joke would've ended up in the reject pile at the old Onion (RIP).
The Onion had some jokes worth just a chyron, some worth a picture, and then some good enough to deserve an article and/or video. (Babylon Bee would do well to decide some of their articles are only worth a chyron.) It's not terribly high-effort, but probably worth a picture joke.
We’re getting to a point in my circles where even liberals admit that the Bee is better than the Onion (sad!), to the extent that anyone remembers the Onion.
Huh. I had thought on it a while too, wondering if there was something I was missing. The photo they used threw me off because it doesn't look that bad to me — much closer to Noem's "before" face than lots of other, scarier photos of her I've seen. Anyway, thanks for clarifying! The new Onion still sucks though.
I just don't understand the Onion joke about Kristi Noem's swollen face. I don't see the swollen . . . Kristi Noem always looks like a very attractive female to me. Was there another photograph following? Or is it just a reflexive jerk of the leftist funny bone to add a snarky twist to any picture of a Republican woman?
The photo next to the headline is what Kristi Noem looked like before acquiring Mar-a-Lago face (Botox, overfilled cheeks and lips, heavy makeup, false lashes). Mileage varies on whether that's an attractive look, but it's generally considered fair game for ridicule since it can be so overdone (see before-and-afters of Lauren Sanchez for a more extreme example). The joke itself doesn't make sense, though, as I point out elsewhere in the comments.
Scratch that — as Cian pointed out, I misunderstood the joke. But I agree with you that the Kristi Noem photo they used is not that bad (there are much worse out there)...so I think the joke still flops, but in a whole different way.
Chris Rock was once asked, specifically about race, when a joke goes too far. I remember his reply in part because I believe it's correct and in part because of his hands-in-air, exasperated tone of voice: "A joke goes too far when it's *not funny.*" I'm not sure if this is morally right, but I find it to be factually true. No wonder Plato banned the artists from his republic.
I'm so close to agreeing with you on this but there's one thing I can't get past. Doesn't it matter who's making the joke also? Tosh's famous rape joke was thought by many to be funny, but I think we can all agree that if Andrew Tate were being heckled by some lady and he told that joke, it would be... not funny. That's an extreme example but it's tricky to determine what "funny" is when the exact same joke can be funny or not funny just because of the personality of the teller.
Generally, though, I agree with you that Chris Rock is correct, even if it still leaves us with questions.
Yes, it matters who's making the joke. Everything matters in comedy, from where you make it to when. The dick who stands up and starts insulting Roseanne Barr is begging for a riposte. If she lays into him, good and hard, the whole audience is having fun with the game.
Here's what I've got: You make a whole "Midwestern Nice" bit about making fun of appearances... The first step is you dodge "it's me making fun of everyone" by making it your kid whose got a mouth, and who isn't trainable. "Hehehe, I got daddy in trouble." Throw in what you please about appearances, but the wrapper, the part you have to sell is "I'm embarrassed" (or else, go with "I am bad at suppressing laughter").
In practice it seems like the rule "don't tell hacky jokes that everybody can see coming a mile away" covers a lot of the appearance-shaming and punching-down type jokes without a need for additional rules.
I think jokes about a person's appearance are like jokes about their name. It's not that they're not funny or clever, it's just extraordinarily unlikely that you're the first person to come up with it.
I would say, joke about their appearance when it's relevant to the main joke. Eg, if Trump puts a tariff on oranges, then a joke about how he's orange himself can help a bigger joke along (obviously the punchline shouldn't just be he's orange, because that's not funny).
Bottom line, appearance jokes are likely to be lazy and overdone.
I like the "if they did this to themselves, mock it" guideline. Another example in the vein of Noem: my wife watches that 90-Day Fiancé show, and the other day while I was making myself something to eat, she had it on. I looked up and audibly yelped when I saw that Darcy woman on the screen. She looks terrifying, and she looks terrifying because she pumped a Ganges River-worth of plastic into her face. That deserves to be mocked, if only to discourage other people from making an equally or more terrible decision for themselves.
I was unfamiliar with Darcey Silva, so I did a Google image search. Good lord. 😳
I KNOW. Now imagine seeing that with a sharp knife in hand
The worst part is THERE ARE TWO OF THEM.
I don't think this discussion was held in the writers' room at SNL, for example. Mitch McConnell is an unfortunate-looking 83 year old man, and I don't think he 'did' anything to himself. But they went mean and hard at his appearance every week for years because they didn't like his politics. It's not a stretch to write mean jokes about, say, Maxine Waters' ghastly countenance, but she's One of Us, so off limits.
I agree with Frantic Pedantic's interpretation of SOME of the McConnell jokes, but I also think you're right that some of them are just "he looks like a turtle". And I won't pretend that I've never laughed at a McConnell turtle joke, but my many years as a comedy writer did make me think "what are the rules"? And you've put your finger on the thing I only hinted at in this article: For some comedy writers, anything goes with old, Republican men.
I actually think the nadir for this type of thing was circa 2019, and more writers are figuring out "PERSONALITY = fair game, APPEARANCE = not so much".
What about something like “Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh”?
On the one hand, the joke falls into the “mean, not his fault” category. On the other, at this point the humor comes less from his actual appearance than from the fact that he was apparently so self-conscious about it that the government banned Winnie the Pooh from China, which is a hilariously absurd overreaction that makes me want to post “Xi is Pooh” memes everywhere.
The fact that he really does look like a turtle aside, I think most of the jokes were more along the lines of “Mitch McConnell, seen here watching [a cute animal have something horrible happen]…” That’s not quite an appearance joke; it’s more directly about him seeming heartless because of his politics.
There is also the question of whether comparing someone to a turtle is an insult…
You have to move the joke along. McConnell the turtle, we strongly urge you to get another shirt. We'll give you a week to reach the closet. ca-ching! It's a quick bit, but it's no longer "one note" about his appearance.
Jokes about appearance seem to have become a progressive comedy trope -- particularly John Oliver. Make fun of how a disfavored person looks at the top of the bit, audience laughs (they hate that person anyway), proceed to mock the subject because of that "proof of why they're disfavored" thing they did. To some extent, the person's appearance is used to justify the ridicule.
If at least ‘punching down’ as a concept dies before I do, I’ll be content.
My general thesis is that whether a joke crosses the line is almost entirely dependent on the delivery and the audience, rather than the broad content of the joke or its target.
People can say the most appalling things about the most vulnerable groups of people and everybody loves them, but something innocuous in comparison (like a fat joke) delivered nastily and in front of the wrong people, for instance, can be relationship destroying.
Drunk people have saved many a joker's career, it is true.
Agree with the “if they did it to themselves” ground rule. I seem to recall Joan Rivers making a lot of plastic surgery jokes—mostly about herself—but pretty sure she did the same to others. My favorite joke of hers is “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, that when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”
This seems broadly correct, except it’s worth considering that women are coerced more than men to make themselves look certain ways. The per-se penalty for aging is much higher in particular, which drives many of them to plastic surgery and fillers that over time begin to look uncanny. If everyone adhered to the rule that you don’t mock or devalue people for naturally aging, this would be mooted, but nobody’s going to do that.
Journalisms often trafficks in "jokes" about the physical appearance of conservative women by printing highly unflattering photos of them. Tulsi Gabbard is a very attractive woman but it seems the media does its best, when running negative stories about her, to use photos that highlight her acne scars. Make the monsters look like monsters....
I think this is a prevalent media tactic not exclusive to conservative women, nor conservatives in general, and is done very much more to attract reader attention than to "make the monsters look like monsters" based on some ideological / political basis.
It would be hard to make the guy look like much of anything other than what he is, but there's a myriad of "unflattering" photos of Trump with facial expressions that make him look much worse than his normal appearance rather than better, physically speaking. And there has been a plethora of unflattering Hilary (and then later) Biden pics.
And the list goes on extensively, on both sides of the aisle. A 'negative' story seems to usually rate an at least *less-than-flattering* pic, regardless of who the subject is. This seems to be encoded into the DNA of the media's M.O. Because while the media can be - and indeed is at times - biased, its real ideology is capitalism and the profit it produces, which is always well-served by negativity of most any kind, including visual.
It's a sign of bad journalism to use an unflattering picture of someone. It's the sign you're dealing with a hack. You can *always* get a bad frame of someone.
... I remember seeing the Wikipedia article for Donald Trump, and looking at the picture thinking "oh those fucking Wikipedia editors, of course they pick something that makes him look evil" .... but, no, it really was honest-to-God his official portrait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_portraits_of_Donald_Trump#/media/File:TrumpPortrait.jpg
Yeah. And if you go to Wikipedia (or anywhere else) and look at his honest-to-God 2023 mugshot from the Fulton County, Georgia jail alongside his official inaugural portrait, I'd think it's fair to say that the White House could have quite easily skipped Daniel Torok and his fee altogether, photoshopped a different color tie, added a lapel pin and the Old Glory background, washed out his complexion and called it good, thus saving the taxpayers quite a tidy little sum, I would imagine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/media/File:Donald_Trump_mug_shot.jpg
I'm sure this is deliberate. Trump will do or say anything in the pursuit of the funny.
Trump thinks that portrait looks cool and macho and stuff.
This is definitely not the case -- yes, you can get a bad frame, but most politicians are trained to reduce the severity of their worst frame. They look plastic. Trump doesn't because he hasn't had that training. You get him with half-lidded eyes, making a weird half grin-grimace.
And Trump's not all that stiff and weird of a guy, either (compare to Elon Musk, who makes weird faces when he's trying to look good for pictures).
Good points. I think there is, however, a current focus on what they're calling "the Trump face" of some of the women in Trump's circle who've had extensive plastic surgery. But, as per your note, they do the same to Hollywood actresses.
For me, the big problem with the Kristi Noem joke is that it's incoherent — allergic swelling wouldn't make all that filler deflate, it would make it worse.
That joke would've ended up in the reject pile at the old Onion (RIP).
That’s the real story here. It just isn’t very funny. The new Onion has fallen off a long ways, unfortunately.
100%. The only problem is that it’s not funny
It's a one-shot joke worth a picture.
The Onion had some jokes worth just a chyron, some worth a picture, and then some good enough to deserve an article and/or video. (Babylon Bee would do well to decide some of their articles are only worth a chyron.) It's not terribly high-effort, but probably worth a picture joke.
We’re getting to a point in my circles where even liberals admit that the Bee is better than the Onion (sad!), to the extent that anyone remembers the Onion.
I think you completely missed the joke. It's not that it would make her face deflate, it's that she already looks like she's been stung by bees
Huh. I had thought on it a while too, wondering if there was something I was missing. The photo they used threw me off because it doesn't look that bad to me — much closer to Noem's "before" face than lots of other, scarier photos of her I've seen. Anyway, thanks for clarifying! The new Onion still sucks though.
I just don't understand the Onion joke about Kristi Noem's swollen face. I don't see the swollen . . . Kristi Noem always looks like a very attractive female to me. Was there another photograph following? Or is it just a reflexive jerk of the leftist funny bone to add a snarky twist to any picture of a Republican woman?
The photo next to the headline is what Kristi Noem looked like before acquiring Mar-a-Lago face (Botox, overfilled cheeks and lips, heavy makeup, false lashes). Mileage varies on whether that's an attractive look, but it's generally considered fair game for ridicule since it can be so overdone (see before-and-afters of Lauren Sanchez for a more extreme example). The joke itself doesn't make sense, though, as I point out elsewhere in the comments.
Look at a picture of Noem in 2015. Now look at her today. Swelling has occurred.
Scratch that — as Cian pointed out, I misunderstood the joke. But I agree with you that the Kristi Noem photo they used is not that bad (there are much worse out there)...so I think the joke still flops, but in a whole different way.
Chris Rock was once asked, specifically about race, when a joke goes too far. I remember his reply in part because I believe it's correct and in part because of his hands-in-air, exasperated tone of voice: "A joke goes too far when it's *not funny.*" I'm not sure if this is morally right, but I find it to be factually true. No wonder Plato banned the artists from his republic.
I'm so close to agreeing with you on this but there's one thing I can't get past. Doesn't it matter who's making the joke also? Tosh's famous rape joke was thought by many to be funny, but I think we can all agree that if Andrew Tate were being heckled by some lady and he told that joke, it would be... not funny. That's an extreme example but it's tricky to determine what "funny" is when the exact same joke can be funny or not funny just because of the personality of the teller.
Generally, though, I agree with you that Chris Rock is correct, even if it still leaves us with questions.
Yes, it matters who's making the joke. Everything matters in comedy, from where you make it to when. The dick who stands up and starts insulting Roseanne Barr is begging for a riposte. If she lays into him, good and hard, the whole audience is having fun with the game.
Here's what I've got: You make a whole "Midwestern Nice" bit about making fun of appearances... The first step is you dodge "it's me making fun of everyone" by making it your kid whose got a mouth, and who isn't trainable. "Hehehe, I got daddy in trouble." Throw in what you please about appearances, but the wrapper, the part you have to sell is "I'm embarrassed" (or else, go with "I am bad at suppressing laughter").
In practice it seems like the rule "don't tell hacky jokes that everybody can see coming a mile away" covers a lot of the appearance-shaming and punching-down type jokes without a need for additional rules.
Killing your dog adds significantly to Noems mock ability level!😳😝🤨
Solid points, good take, funny, and even an ancient Mesopotamian reference. Epic, Maurer.
Thoughtful and well-considered, Jeff. I think you hit every nail firmly on the head.
In short, joke away!
Yes, we should absolutely carve the rules of comedy into an obelisk like an enormous tattooed phallus.