A Trump presidency must also be a laughing matter

By E.W.

COMEDIANS and politicians once delighted in the idea of a Trump presidency. Seth Meyers, host of “Late Night”, noted that “Trump owns the Miss USA Pageant, which is great for Republicans, because it will streamline their search for a vice president.” At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Barack Obama joked that Donald Trump “certainly would bring some change to the White House,” as the screen flashed to an image of the “Trump White House Resort and Casino” replete with gold pillars and neon purple signs. Two years later, John Oliver urged Mr Trump to run: “Do it. Do it,” he said on the “Daily Show”. “I will personally write you a campaign check now, on behalf of this country, which does not want you to be president, but which badly wants you to run.”

Now the joke has mutated into reality. In the immediate aftermath of Mr Trump’s victory, laughter has proved difficult. Judd Apatow, a comedy behemoth involved in such films as “Anchorman”, “Knocked Up” and “Bridesmaids”, tweeted on election night: “One thing I do not want to watch right now—comedy about any of this. That’s how terrifying and disappointing this is.”

Many shows opted for anger or grief instead. “I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight,” Trevor Noah, the host of the “Daily Show”, began (though he sneaked one in with a comment about “shitting [his] pants”). Kate McKinnon, dressed as Hillary Clinton, opened “Saturday Night Live” (“SNL”) with a performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. It was moving and fitting; it seemed to sum up the anguish of a stunned nation. Meanwhile, on “Last Week Tonight”, John Oliver unleashed liberal fury, with a video of people yelling “Fuck 2016” and the image of a giant “2016” sign going up in flames. He also turned activist, calling on his viewers to “stay here and fight” by donating to NGOs that defend the rights Mr Trump has threatened to attack.

In time, though, the moratorium on jokes will fade. The Trump administration will make plenty of laughable mistakes (which no politician can avoid, least of all a swaggering political novice). But satirising the Donald on late-night television is a slippery business: the fusion of entertainment and politics is part of what made his rise possible in the first place. Shows like “SNL” and Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” were criticised during the campaign for going too easy on the candidate. “SNL” had him host and take part in silly sketches; Mr Fallon affectionately ruffled his comb over. This briefly made him seem acceptable—even likable—rather than dangerous.

That was unfortunate. Comedy can be an important medium for political resistance. It is no coincidence that satire is heavily suppressed in Russia, North Korea and China. “The only worse thing for a dictator than being criticised is being laughed at,” a Russian journalist told Samantha Bee. In fact, there has been plenty of laughter at Mr Trump’s expense—like John Oliver’s campaign to “Make Donald Drumpf Again”, the most-viewed segment on his show. The name “Trump”, Mr Oliver pointed out, was changed by a “prescient ancestor” from “Drumpf”: “And ‘Drumpf’ is much less magical. It’s the sound produced when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy. It’s the sound of a bottle of store-brand root beer falling off the shelf in a gas station minimart.” Then came Alec Baldwin’s impressions on “SNL”. He lectured Ms McKinnon’s Clinton on the correct pronunciation of China (“It’s Gina”), and warned viewers that he was “going to be so good tonight…so calm and so presidential that all of you watching are going to cream your jeans.” It irritated Mr Trump to the extent that he called for “SNL” to be cancelled.

So why wasn’t it enough to sway voters? Jonathan Coe, an English writer, suggests that laughing at politicians has lost its edgy nature. “Anti-establishment comedy was a product of a more naive and deferential age,” he writes, “when to stand on a West End stage and make fun of the prime minister could be seen, briefly, as a radical act.” Now politicians are predictable targets: to poke fun at them is about as original as poking fun at mothers-in-law. The public’s laughter, instead of being subversive, is merely “an unthinking reflex…a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly…a substitute for thought rather than its conduit”.

There is another reason comedy’s political power has faded. Satirists’ power to undermine the system depends on their position as outsiders, calling out the corruption and failures of the ruling class through laughter. But as Heather LaMarre of Temple University says, many political comedians are no longer the little guy picking on the big guy; they’re celebrities—part of the liberal urban elite.

This dynamic may shift once Mr Trump is inaugurated. Come January, Democrats will have little power in Washington. So, says Ms LaMarre, comedians, nearly all of them with hearts beating on the left, will start to look like outsiders again. If Mr Trump tries to censor or sue critics, as he has talked of doing, this will only heighten the effect. But comedians would be wise, Ms LaMarre says, to go after the politicians—not their voters. This may have been a fatal mistake during the 2016 campaign: comedians began making fun of Trump supporters, trying to shame Americans away from Mr Trump. This makes people push back, and it gave Mr Trump further evidence that comedians had joined the hated elite, while he, the billionaire son of a millionaire, was a fed-up outsider.

Comedians should look to the example of Jon Stewart. Though a paid-up member of the media elite during the George W. Bush years, he kept his status as a contrarian because he almost never went after supporters of Mr Bush, keeping his outrage for the administration and its policies, in defence of the people. This is as it should be. Juvenal, a Roman satirist, asked “Who will watch over the watchmen?” His implicit answer is the satirist. As Mr Trump and his cadre become the establishment they railed against, comedians will have the chance to inhabit their proper role. In his post-election monologue, Mr Meyers put the Trump administration on notice: “We here at ‘Late Night’ will be watching you.”