Hillary Clinton is a cold-hearted manipulative android designed by focus groups. Bernie Sanders doesn’t own a hairbrush. Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Haha. Hilarious. Some real knee-slappers.
This past election year has been undeniably distinct in more ways than one. Candidates have made statements that have ranged from the insulting to “What on earth is Ben Carson doing? That man used to be a successful neurosurgeon.” This carnival of campaigns has provided a rich, fertile field of content for political pundits and more importantly, political comedians.
Unfortunately, fertile fields are made by shoveling mounds of manure onto them and this year, there has been more than enough manure to manage.
Speaking of manure, I suppose I am obligated to now mention Donald Trump. Here is his name here being associated with manure. As Jeb Bush would say, “Please clap.”
What happens when every tweet, soundbite, video clip or gif of a candidate’s gaffe can be extended into a two-minute comedy bit for us all to gawk and guffaw at?
Late night hosts and comedians begin to harvest the same crop of redundant jokes and jabs to monologue into their echo chambers.
Part of the problem is that there is an unprecedented number of such humorists this election saturating my newsfeed and suggested YouTube video list. There’s Noah, Meyers, Colbert, Bee, Kimmel, Fallon, Oliver, O’Brien and probably a couple others I forgot and you forgot too. All these comedians are clamoring over one another to vie for our views.
This wouldn’t be that much problem if each found a niche role in political mockery and had varying styles, takes and opinions to contribute but they don’t really have that.
The jokes of these comedians have boiled down to iterations of [insert gross and/or weird orange image to refer to Donald Trump] + [new inflammatory absurd comment he said and/or tweeted on the toilet], [insert critical comment about Republicans refusing to denounce Trump], [insert side comment about Hillary doing something unscrupulous or mechanical] and [Donald Trump has small hands].
Political humor is the mixer to the shot of unadulterated disillusionment-inspiring truth for us to down. A lot of this comedy rests on taking some sort of unacknowledged truth and putting an absurd spin on it.
But then Donald Trump started talking.
Try making the following statement sound more absurd than it actually is: “When Mexico send its people, they’re not sending the best... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re racists. And some, I assume are good people.”
This was said right when Trump announced he was running for president and is the first of many repeated blurbs used to characterize his campaign. This statement also marks the beginning of when it became both very easy and very difficult to develop political comedy.
Comedians could now just play the clip of that statement or anything similar to score laughs of incredulity. But trying to make what he says more absurd than it already is proves to be the real challenge. Especially when things Trump says escalate to banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. or grabbing at female genitalia without consent.
So comedians have kind of stopped trying to do that. Instead, they aim to be the voices of reason to pick out exactly how what Donald Trump says and does is blatantly wrong, and it’s great that they do that. Except when their audiences are primarily not Trump denouncers, their comedy doesn’t add further points to what we already know and expect. Their humor and points become obvious to us.
And then when they get tired of carefully tearing apart everything Donald Trump does, they start yelling and the censors start dropping bleeps into the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] dialogues (except for HBO — thank you for supporting freedom of expression, HBO). It is amusing to see people like Samantha Bee or John Oliver throw their hands up in the air and gesture madly at the camera cursing everything associated with Donald Trump, but that is something that you could really see from anyone who’s not a Trump supporter.
Comedy is hard to begin with and the presence of Donald Trump makes it all the more difficult. I do not blame the comedians for being caught in this rut of the same joke formulas and unendingly using Trump as the fodder for their jokes. But there are other political things to make fun of and reveal some sort of truth about.
In the last White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Larry Wilmore said, “Black Lives Matter is here tonight. I’m just kidding. Relax, white people, they’re not here. It’s just a joke. Just relax, relax.”
This sort of insight through humor is what these comedians should strive for more often. Wilmore’s joke touched upon the discomfort that some white folks feel about the Blacks Lives Matter movement and forced the room of full of white people to acknowledge that within themselves.
It was the mixer to the shot of truth we don’t always want to accept.
This whole election seems to have turned into a giant joke with we, the American people, as the butt of it. But at least, hopefully, we could have a good laugh about it when it’s over.
