In the Watergate movie All the President’s Men, informant “Deep Throat” advises investigative reporters to “follow the money.” But as contemporary scandals ensnare the White House, another insider might counsel: “Follow the funny.”
“Comedians can say things journalists can’t say now,” says Palestinian American comic Dean Obeidallah. “They cut right to the chase, tell you what’s going on—and make you laugh about it.”
Obeidallah, who hosts a daily three-hour radio program on SiriusXM Progress and is a commentator for various news outlets, wrote a piece on this topic for CNN. “In the age of Donald Trump, it’s not the Democrats leading the opposition—it’s the comedians . . . . [They] are now the ones with a ‘bully pulpit’ to raise issues in ways that dominate our social media feeds and impact the larger political conversation.”
Radio host Stephanie Miller proclaims, “Now every comedian is pressed into service. Whether it’s Saturday Night Live, SNL’s Kate McKinnon, Stephen Colbert, or Samantha Bee, comedians really are leading the resistance, because they’re speaking truth to power.”
Why are comics in the anti-Trump vanguard? Freud wrote that “humor is not resigned; it is rebellious.” That’s why conservative comedy rarely succeeds—there’s nothing funny about defending the status quo and picking on the powerless—while deflating authority figures is usually funny.
Freud wrote, “humor is not resigned; it is rebellious.” That’s why conservative comedy rarely succeeds—there’s nothing funny about defending the status quo.
“People really need comedy, it’s empowering, it’s helping people to not feel afraid,” insists Miller, whose daily three-hour drive-time show is available on terrestrial stations, SiriusXM Progress, Free Speech TV, and podcasts.
Bassem Youssef—fans call him “Jon Stewart of Egypt”—expresses similar sentiments. “I came from a country where authority is not just respected, it’s feared.” Youssef tells The Progressive. “Comedy takes away that fake respect authoritarian regimes surround themselves with. [It makes it so] people aren’t afraid of authority; authority is afraid of them.”
“Comedy is a shrinking ray,” adds standup Rick Overton, whose credits include Bill Murray’s 1993 Groundhog Day, HBO’s Veep, and Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, a drama about stand-up comedy. “It aims at something that’s big and scary and goes ‘zap.’ Every time it hits it, the target gets a little smaller.”
Mirth and mockery can boost morale. It can right wrong. It can even, perhaps, bring down a bully like Donald Trump.
Throughout history—as far back as the Greek and Roman playwrights Aristophanes and Plautus—humorists have played the unique role of speaking jokes to power. Europe’s medieval court jesters had South Pacific counterparts called fale aitu (house of spirits) in Samoa, who performed social critiques disguised as comic antics.
“Shakespeare used the fool as a literary device,” observes Obeidallah. “Famously, in King Lear, the fool had the freedom to say things to the king no one else dared to, but he’d say it in jest.”
In A Modest Proposal, Dublin-born satirist Jonathan Swift ridiculed insensitivity to the poor and the Irish in 1729, by suggesting the destitute make money by selling their children to the rich to eat. The term “Yahoo” comes from Swift’s beloved 1726 Gulliver’s Travels, which mocked monarchs and war.
Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer made Americans chuckle in 1876, but after the Spanish-American War, Twain skewered U.S. interventionism and atrocities in the Philippines, declared he’s “opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land,” and served as vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League.
During the 1960s, the Smothers Brothers were clean-cut folksingers with a hipper, youth-oriented comedy-variety show on CBS showcasing rockers like Jefferson Airplane and comedians like George Carlin and Pat Paulsen, who ran a tongue-in-cheek presidential campaign.
“The Smothers Brothers broke a lot of ground, legitimizing what was considered dirty, hippie protest, drug-addled beatniks,” says Overton, who performed with the pair. “They were personally very innocent and benign delivery systems for unbelievably daring, bold, and candid messages. It was done very intelligently to soften the blow for waking up out of a fifties mindset.”
The Smothers Brothers legitimized what was considered dirty, hippie protest, drug-addled beatniks...They were very innocent and benign delivery systems for unbelievably daring, bold, and candid messages.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour drew flak from advertisers and the network. In 1967, when Pete Seeger, making his first network TV appearance since being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a scathing critique of the Vietnam War, CBS removed it from the final tape. The following year, it allowed Seeger to sing this song but censored an entire program where Joan Baez dedicated a song to her husband, anti-war activist David Harris. Then it canceled the show altogether.
Today, the airwaves are brimming with sharp political commentary, including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Daily Show alumna Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal.
While humor has needled the establishment through the ages, today’s high-tech, televised, digitized, wired world makes comedy more potent than ever as a form of resistance in the Trump era.
Comedy, says Maz Jobrani, an Iranian American comedian and actor, “is a big way to deal with suffering. People who are oppressed cope with oppression through comedy, whether it’s African Americans or Jews or now, Middle Easterners. I heard D.L. Hughley say, ‘comedy is a way to give people their medicine—but in orange juice, so they don’t know they’re getting their medicine.’ It’s a great way to talk about serious issues without preaching when your people are persecuted.”
"Comedy is a big way to deal with suffering."
Obeidallah (who formerly belonged to the “Axis of Evil Comedy Tour” with Jobrani) is on the same page. “Laughing at these scary figures is empowering to us and cathartic, at a time when people are very stressed out about Donald Trump,” he says. “It’s mentally healthy for all of us. It recharges and revitalizes us, gives hope to the resistance—that things aren’t so bleak, because we’re laughing at this guy, together.”
Before President Trump’s trip abroad last May, New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins jibed, “Trump has spent his entire political career warning Americans that ‘the world is laughing at us.’ But now it really, really is.” On HBO’s Real Time, Bill Maher called Trump “the laughingstock on the world stage.”
Sendups of Trump include Alec Baldwin’s devastating impersonation on Saturday Night Live, Colbert’s “Cartoon Trump,” and Comedy Central’s The President Show featuring Anthony Atamanuik. The President is an easy, tempting target, starting with his appearance. Last year, the overweight seventy-year-old told Dr. Oz that when he looks in the mirror, “I see a person who is thirty-five.” Imagine the time and money Trump—whose vanity exceeds his bank account—expends on maintaining his Dorian Gray-like illusions.
The very notion of a reality TV star becoming leader of the free world is inherently funny. Trump sports the most bizarre headgear seen on TV since Fess Parker wore Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap in the 1950s. Comedian Will Durst, writing in The Progressive, cracked that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un “flipped out” because The Donald surpassed the Beloved Leader as being “atop the prestigious ‘World’s Wackiest Leader with the Most Peculiar Hair’ list.”
More madcap lies beneath Trump’s fright wig. After Trump tweeted that his proposed immigration restrictions were indeed a “travel ban,” which his staff had gone to great lengths to deny, an attorney challenging Trump in court called him “co-counsel.”
“Trump is bad for the world but good for comedy,” Jobrani says. “Normally [comedy] takes lots of time to write, but he makes it easy by doing crazy, stupid shit.” Jobrani’s upcoming Netflix special includes about thirty minutes of Trump material.
Trump personifies America’s worst attributes: unbridled greed, egotism, arrogance, bigotry. He suffers from acute affluenza—being born into privilege deprives him of ethics. But beneath his braggadocio is nagging insecurity. Deep down, Trump knows he’s a great pretender. He endlessly boasts about himself, demanding flattery and attention. He projects a tough guy persona (despite those gnarly bone spurs that kept him out of Vietnam) and must always win.
Trump’s double-speakers likewise invite ridicule. And ridicule seems to be having an impact. Press Secretary Sean Spicer—called a “human pincushion” by Obama operative David Axelrod—reduced his press conferences after Melissa McCarthy’s humiliating impression. After Kate McKinnon devastated Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway as a megalomaniacal celeb wannabe, her media profile was also cut back.
Trump and his minions are comic gold mines.
Trump and his minions are comic gold mines. “There’s a reason why SNL’s ratings are the highest they’ve ever been, Colbert’s beating The Tonight Show, my radio show is doing better than ever,” says Stephanie Miller. Her Sexy Liberal Resistance Tour, performed all across America, “sells out everywhere, months in advance. People fly from all over the country.”
Miller calls the monthly live program “like a radio show without the FCC.” Comics John Fugelsang and “Frangela” (Frances Collier and Angela Shelton) perform standup. Guests have included Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan, Rob Reiner, Lily Tomlin, and outed ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Meanwhile, Trump has brought Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness” to new lows. In the age of “fake news,” Trump—who lost the popular vote—is a fake President. A quote attributed to George Orwell reminds us, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
If Trump and his team view the press as “the opposition party” and “enemies of the people,” what do they think of those who hold them up to public ridicule?
“We know it gets under his skin,” says Obeidallah. “Trump watches SNL.” In October 2016, fuming over Baldwin’s impression of him as a know-nothing, preening blowhard, Trump tweeted, “Time to retire the boring and unfunny show.”
While Obeidallah allows that “nobody likes to be made fun of,” he pegs Trump as especially thin-skinned. He sued Bill Maher for more than $5 million for a joke about him being the spawn of orangutans and questioned why Jon Stewart changed his name from Jonathan Leibowitz. “Trump would do anything to demonize us, silence us,” warns Obeidallah.
While President George W. Bush gamely endured a White House Correspondents’ Dinner alongside a Bush impersonator, Trump refused to attend this year’s event. Obeidallah believes it’s because “he didn’t want to be compared to Obama as a joke teller” and “he’s afraid to be mocked.”
And there is blowback on the comedians themselves. “Trump supporters heckle comedians more than we’ve ever been heckled before,” Obeidallah says. “That’s alarming to us, because some of his supporters truly would support cracking down on dissent, if it meant defending their beloved Donald. If there was a terrorist attack and Trump said, ‘I want to suspend criticism of me for a period of time,’ lots of his supporters would go along with it.”
Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, SNL writer Katie Rich was suspended for an Inauguration Day tweet about Barron Trump. After Colbert’s partially bleeped monologue crack—“The only thing [Trump’s] mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster”—there were calls for an FCC investigation. Kathy Griffin was fired from her CNN New Year’s Eve gig after she posed with a bloody severed faux Trump head. The gag was reportedly especially upsetting for Trump’s children, particularly eleven-year-old Barron.
But where was the Trumpsters’ condemnation when Donald peddled birther conspiracies, undermining the legitimacy of the nation’s first black President at a time when Sasha Obama was younger than Barron? Or when the pussy-grabber-in-chief incited violence at campaign rallies, argued for Second Amendment responses to Clinton, and publicly called her “a nasty woman.” How about when his now-disgraced flunky Michael Flynn jeered, “Lock her up!”
As Joy Behar plaintively asked on The View, “Why do comedians have to be more politically correct than the President?”
“Why do comedians have to be more politically correct than the President?”
Egypt’s Bassem Youssef, the subject of Sara Taksler’s 2016 documentary, Tickling Giants, knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of tyrants’ wrath. For three years, he withstood constant blowback for his wildly popular nightly comedy show, Al-Bernameg, patterned after The Daily Show, with its sharp satirical take on current events.
“The Muslim Brotherhood tried to shut me down; they couldn’t,” Youssef recalls. “Then the military came—in the Middle East, the military is more revered and sacred than religion—and they shut me down, because I was making fun of the pillars of their rule. I had to leave Egypt.”
Tennessean Trae Crowder, a stand-up comedian who bills himself as the “Liberal Redneck,” says political comedy’s current role is “keeping everybody from being too bummed out or freaked out or scared.” He is less certain about what difference it makes.
Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the “Liberal Redneck.”
“Can political comedians be agents of change?” he asks. “I don’t know. Maybe, in some instances. Most of the time, it don’t move the needle that much. Especially today, when everybody lives in their own bubble. [So] I don’t know how much it makes a difference. But it’s still very, very important. You have to be able to laugh at it.”
Taksler, the documentarian, frames it a bit differently. “I don’t think comedy on its own changes anything,” she says. “Comedy doesn’t matter if all you do is watch it and laugh.” For comedy to have an effect, people must organize, agitate, and vote. “Then comedy can be really useful as a tool in changing society.”
Film historian/reviewer Ed Rampell is a longtime contributor to The Progressive.