Why Trump is Satire-Proof

Or non-stick, anyway. Like Teflon, but louder

Political satire is a really, really stupid field to get into because most people only laugh at jokes they agree with. Plumbing doesn’t work this way. Toilets don’t unclog depending on whether or not you use a blue or red plunger. So far as I know, prostitutes don’t move johns to climax only if the johns agree with the bumper stickers on their car.

Political satirists have to either pigeonhole ourselves on a side, and play to our team, or (my preferred cuck method) forever alienate half our prospective audience by continually switching back and forth to show how marvelously independent and aloof we are.

If you’re a comedian, it’s much better to make jokes about donuts and dating. Better yet, get a job as a plumber. (Or a hooker.)

Trump is not exactly Lex Luthor to the field of political satire, but whatever character he is loves gilding his furniture, jewelry, and dentures in kryptonite, all of which make the joke-clobbering more laborious.

Exaggeration is Dead

When you open up the newspaper and read a headline like “Trump hits golf balls off of Nuclear Destroyer at Rosy O'Donnell” there’s not much you can exaggerate. We’re already operating at 10/10 on the scale.

It’s sort of like how it’s impossible to parody something that’s already funny. I can make a parody about a generic spy thriller:

I can’t make a parody about Anchor Man, because there’s no way I’m going to somehow take the bones of that film and then come up with something funnier.

Now on a weekly basis I read some headline and am momentarily confused about whether I stumbled into CNN or The Onion. (Why are there headlines? I’m on Only Fans!) The news itself is whacky. This doesn’t make it impossible to lampoon our president, but it restricts creative options.

In some alternate, saner universe where Mitch Daniels and Jeff Flake are the respective President and Backup President, it would be a lot easier to cycle through exaggeration as a comedic tool. Imagine Mitch Daniels doing practically anything other than being measured. I don’t think I can even picture him mowing a lawn. Try it: imagine Mitch Daniels juggling, or riding a horse. See?

In this alternate universe (where I am happily married and live in a submarine) I can write funny bits about President Daniels ordering Hollywood to make Rush Hour 3, or threatening to invade Canada or whatnot.

Say what you will about Obama, he was fairly serious—this meant if you portrayed him as goofy, the inversion made jokes tumble out.

This Clickhole headline worked with Obama, but if we tried it with Trump, it might simply turn out to be real:

Mitt Romney is affable, serious, and (fortunately for comedy!) a late-stage Mormon. In yet another alternate universe (where I have re-married, and live on a Moon Base) I can write jokes about Romney banging porn stars, and they work, because everyone on the planet including Mitt’s wife assumes he only mates using a combination of calendar evites and contract law.

Trump Fatigue

We are now ten years into the Trump era, and maybe, maybe there have been five days in the entire stretch in which he did not dominate headlines. Usually a pope had to die, or divorce Johnny Depp or something. Or Gaza.

Fortunately for me, I’m pretty good at tuning out the news, probably because I have to talk about it so much. But most people have developed an entirely new brain component, roughly analogous to the hippocampus, wholly dedicated to obsessing over Whatever Trump Said Today. So much of their brain is now dedicated to Trump Analysis that most sane, emotionally stable people (read: Mitch Daniels) don’t want more Trump stuff in their life.

Even if we had been blessed with two terms of President Jon Huntsman, and the gods returned exaggeration to us like holy fire, a fertile satire character will still eventually grow repetitive and audiences grow fatigued.

In any of the alternate universes in which I am married and live in some kind of space-age Victorian habitat, we would eventually get tired of making “Romney is stuffy” jokes. But that would be fine, because Romney would only appear in headlines once a week or so, probably after Romney took out an ad in the Washington Post. Jokes about the president would stay fresh, because joke farming would be able to utilize content crop rotation.

Not so with Trump. We are in humor monoculture territory. The Iowa cornfield of jokes.

For example: the orange thing. We blazed through all of the variants of “look, he’s so orange!” about halfway through 2016. The cupboard is bare. “Trump is an idiot” and “Trump is mean” have also been squeezed a billion plus times. My problem with most Trump satire is not that I disagree with it, I just don’t find it remotely novel.

Today, if you want to make fun of Trump, you really have to come up with some brilliant out-of-the-box position. Which is great, I suppose, if you’re a creative genius. But if you’re a workman comic such as myself, trying to hermit crab my way into P. J. O’Rourke’s career, you best shrug and make fun of Marco Rubio instead.

Trump Is Actually Funny

I don’t like this. I take no joy in this statement. But. Trump is actually pretty funny.

A lot of people believe that if someone is bad, they cannot be funny. This is incorrect. I doubt Joseph Stalin, for example, was particularly droll. But he could have been. Comedic timing and word choice are orthogonal to moral character and/or tax policy. As a comic, I can report that many of the more hilarious standups I knew in New York City were “troubled.”

Trump has excellent comedic timing. He’s a media personality with a billion reps under his belt. He’s also an adroit insult comic along the lines of Don Rickles, if Don Rickles could potentially kill you, or topple Iran. That timing and shock value give him a leg over other garden variety politicians and lizard people. (A lot of the Trump tribute bands don’t get this—they just see him being nasty, and act nasty, and are rightly reviled for it.)

Imagine if Triumph the Insult Comic Dog got into a fight with the Federal Reserve. That’s what we’re dealing with.

So What Happens?

I don’t tend to do a lot of Trump jokes, because I think I’m a lot more likely to wind up slumming clapter or possibly getting punched in an Applebee’s parking lot. In my case, I focus on Trump policies, because now I can make fun of ideas.

Are there ways to make fun of Trump? Absolutely. Should political satirists make fun of the president? Yes, of course. Will I ever get married and live on a Moon base? That thin hope is all that’s keeping me from gobbling SSRI’s.

For the most part, though, I think political satirists either have to lob joke grenades at everything around Trump (policies and minions) or do the much, much harder task of coming up with out-of-the-box humor which nobody else has yet devised, poignant but novel.

That exists, and I respect it. But it requires a much higher level of skill than it will in about three years, when I return from exile to make fun of President Newsom.