The Joke's on Us
One of the challenges being on the new CNN show Have I Got News For You is that we’re supposed to be an equal opportunity offending show, but the Republicans are making it so goddamned hard. In a week in which one Republican was defending her assertion that “they” control the weather, others were lying about FEMA’s response to said weather, and a third – who happens to be running for president – was promising that MS-13 gang members are going to occupy your home if he loses. That’s a lot of crazy for one week, and it’s hard to find much by way of comparison coming from the Democratic side.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are running on normalcy. They make a normal-sounding proposal: $25,000 credit to help first-time home buyers purchase a house, for example, which is received by the Republicans as if Vladimir Lenin opened his mausoleum case in Red Square and marched to the top of Mt. Communism to proclaim a new Commandment. Meanwhile, Trump is out there promising to re-enact the Trail of Tears and we’re supposed to act like the two are equal? How are we supposed to make fun of a stodgy old tax credit when you’ve got a guy, as this week’s guest John Hodgman said, reading from the Book of Hannibal Lecter?
Comedy is like water. It tends to pool in low places and run downhill from there. Trump is currently the lowest place our country has on offer. It’s a depression carved from years of right-wing propaganda, with assists from hysterical white Evangelicals and foreign actors happy to use our own internal divisions against us. I don’t know how many millions of years it took the Colorado River to make the Grand Canyon, but we’ve found ourselves in a deeper hole than that after only nine years of Trump.
A proper country would have both political parties acting with the same level of desperation and absurdity. A proper country would have clown cars of demented pols from both parties throwing pies in each other’s faces. A proper country wouldn’t be on the precipice of profound civil unrest because one of its political leaders can’t accept that he got fired from a job he never wanted in the first place.
Sure, the Democrats have a few fools of their own but nothing like the rogue’s gallery that MAGA has elevated to positions of power and prominence. There is no Democratic Marjorie Taylor Green, no Democratic Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz. The closest we had to a George Santos was Robert Menendez keeping gold bars in his fridge. We’ve also got New York mayor Eric Adams, but, again, he’s going to get tossed out on his ear instead of being pardoned and promoted, as Trump’s wiseguy associates tend to be.
Plus, there’s also the small problem that Trump may be fun to laugh at when he shits his pants at a speech, as he did yesterday, but there’s nothing funny about his dehumanizing and racist rhetoric. There’s nothing funny about his threats to prosecute his political enemies and to use the power of the federal government to attack institutions and organizations that find his displeasure. There’s nothing funny about his legions of dough-brained fans pining for him to become a dictator. We spend a lot of time laughing on the show with the understanding that none of this stuff is funny at all. It’s sick.
A good way to combat sickness is with laughter. If it weren’t, the movie Patch Adams would never have been made. The thing about ol’ Patch, though, is that he did all his finest comedic work in the hospital. That’s great, but I would prefer for the nation to not feel as if we’re in critical condition. I would like us to be able to ourselves for our American bravado and our American absurdity and our American idiosyncrasies, not because one of our Presidential candidates is riling up his base with racist lies and dangerous propaganda. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs” is funny when it’s divorced from the actual message, which is that Black and Brown people are dangerous.
The longer I live, the more I worry that the sickness at the heart of the Trump campaign speaks to a deep sickness in the American heart. It’s a birth defect, really, formed when chattel slavery was introduced to this new world. A nation founded on oppression cannot be entrusted to lead the so-called free world without confronting its own diseased past. When we refuse to do so, the same symptoms appear again and again, sometimes less severe and sometimes more. Right now, the symptoms are pretty fucking severe and half of the nation seems ready and willing to cut ourselves to shreds over them.
I have no idea how any of this ends up. Somebody online said to me that a Trump win will be good for the show. I said I’d happily give up the show if it means Trump goes bye-bye. I meant it.
In truth, though, I believe that Trump’s hoped-for loss will actually be better for our show – and for comedy, and for the world. We will always have buffoons in positions of power at whom we can point our fingers. We will always have idiots believing they are smarter than everybody else (present idiots exempted, of course). We will always have puffery to puncture. What we won’t have, hopefully in a month or so, is the unique danger of Donald J. Trump.
How this two-bit hokum artist managed to connive half of a nation will be the subject of history books to come. Future Americans, I’m sure, will look back at this moment and wonder how we ever let ourselves walk right up to the edge of the cliff. Hopefully, they will read in those books about how, at the last minute, we stepped back. Hopefully, some future hosts of some future comedy quiz show will wonder how we could have been so stupid. And, hopefully, they will have a huge laugh at our expense. We deserve it.
The USA could use a South African style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to confront our history of slavery. Instead we have a white South African born man-child working with Trump to make apartheid happen here.
We are being deeply failed by most media (MSM). Cowards. If they simply and clearly explained how eroded Trump’s mind actually is rather than ignoring his truly unsuitability for any office more complicated than a broom closet, things would be very different. The fact that all his previous national security professionals have said he’s a danger to the nation should be the top of every news story. It’s the largest dereliction of duty in history.