In an interview with Joel McHale of foxnews.com (7/25/2017), Blanche Johnson talks about “making an audience laugh” in a different way:
BJ: Joel McHale… says he’d like to go back to Washington to make President Trump laugh.
JM: If he would show up I would do it. I would do it in a heartbeat. If they ask me to do it and he was coming… “f–k yeah.” I think it’s important for presidents –- especially American presidents, because they are literally the most powerful person on the planet — to show that they can take a joke…
BJ: He said every president has been able to handle a joke until now, and he thinks it’s important to show other countries our leader can laugh.
JM: …[In] a lot of other countries, reporters are put in jail for making derogatory comments or perceived jokes or something. In America, it’s the best country in the world, because reporters and comedians can say stuff.
JM: Comedians, especially, can say jokes, and the last few presidents have all been like, “Cool, thanks, now we’ll go back to defending democracy.”
Whereas Johnson uses the term “making [an audience] laugh,” she’s using the word “make” in a different sense than we’ve seen before. Before, we’ve talked about how this phrasing reduces an audience to an object that is acted upon.
Here, McHale is talking about the value of having a sense of humor, to “take a joke,” and the pressure to not be “that guy” – the guy that can’t take it. In our culture, that pressure is immense. Thus, if McHale tells a joke in front of and about Trump, Trump has to take it. He must at minimum “guffaw,” or risk showing that he doesn’t have a sense of humor.
So this “making Trump [or anyone in power] laugh,” is not about acting on him in a mind controlling way, but employing social norms to provoke or coerce a laugh. [I’ll have more about the pressure to have a sense of humor coming soon – soo many articles to cover!]
