I write a lot here on the value of addressing political ideas through humor, it’s pretty much the sole purpose of this blog. Well, GQ‘s Jay Willis in a write-up about Trevor Noah’s recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers (9/7/2017), weighs in.
Overdone
Willis begins with the notion that in making fun of Trump, we are perhaps anesthetizing ourselves:
Only seven months and change into Donald Trump’s presidency, many of you may be starting to feel as if you’ve heard every grim, nihilistic analogy straining to do justice to his patented cocktail of malevolence and incompetence at least a dozen times over.
Yes, when hearing the same jokes and comments, over and over, they might not only lose their potency and have less of an effect, but in reality normalize Trump’s behavior. However, perhaps they’re just constant reminders that Trump’s behavior is not normal. I fear the day when we let his antics pass without joke, because we expect nothing more from him.
Reduction
Then there’s the idea that in reducing the situation to a joke, you somehow diminish the seriousness of that foundational situation itself. Willis includes this as an offhand remark:
Perhaps sensing that speaking flippantly and dismissively about Trump threatens to obfuscate the objectively evil, cruel things he’s doing from the White House—decisions that pose serious threats to both lives and livelihoods.
Yes, if you treat the news in a flippant way, doing the standard Late Night Leno-izing and hit all sides, you can make it seem like there’s no real substance there at all. If we simply comment on Trump’s hair, we push his policies out of the discussion. However, if we focus on the policies, and make jokes about them, we keep them centered in the discussion.
Guffaws
One of the aspects that I’ve addressed here is the idea that you can take away someone’s power by laughing at them. That when we laugh in the face of a problem, we display that we are not afraid of it, that we don’t take it seriously – and that this laugh is a performance. It doesn’t mean that we take the problem less seriously. Trevor Noah expresses some of this in his statements:
People come to me and say, “Why would you guys laugh [at Trump]?” Two things: First of all, I’ve had the pleasure and been blessed enough to travel the world and see many countries. And there are many countries I’ve been to where people don’t have free speech, and one of the biggest things that an authoritarian leader tries to remove from you is the ability to make jokes about them. In South Africa, you couldn’t tell jokes about the government during apartheid. That’s something that I cherish. A person is less frightening when you are laughing. It doesn’t diminish what they do, but it’s how we cope with these situations. For me, when I look at Donald Trump, he is a paradox for me, emotionally. On the one hand, I am terrified at the notion that he’s the president of the most powerful nation in the world. On the other hand, I know that I’m going to wake up and he’s going to make me laugh. The two things co-exist.
While it’s true, he says that Trump will make him laugh, perhaps legitimately, he also expresses that we laugh to cope, to make the person seem less frightening, and that this in no way diminishes the severity of the moment. However, Willis doesn’t agree:
This is a fair observation, but this palliative brand of “Laugh to take away his power!” logic has limits, and the late-night comedy world might occasionally be drawing closer to them than it thinks. Using humor to subvert Donald Trump can become counterproductive if the hunt for clever, creative, quick-witted responses dulls people’s appetites to find ways to take meaningful action in response to whatever the president’s latest crime against democracy happens to be. Jokes can play an important role in the Trump era, yes, but only for as long as they don’t inadvertently inhibit substantive engagement along the way.
Here we come again to Postman’s idea of “Amusing ourselves to death”; that if we’re laughing, we may be avoiding doing meaningful political action. However, I’m trying to call into question this whole trivial/substantive split when applied to humor. Humor can be substantive, when it deals with substantive issues and makes deep, cutting points. We just have to ask comedians for it.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
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