Note On Political Humor
I have seen headlines over the past few days railing against the incredible racist fascism on display at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. Dismissing this as just the usual mainstream media hyperbole and something-out-of-nothing-ism, I refused even to allow myself to scan any of the articles to find out what the supposed controversy was all about. Today, however, I admit to having been intrigued enough by a Fox headline on my news feed — “Jon Stewart defends comedian who joked about Puerto Rico at Trump rally: ‘I find that guy very funny’” — that after seeing it a couple of times, I finally clicked to find out what all of this was about.
Allow me to explain my motivation here. I was not clicking on this story out of some sort of anti-woke satisfaction at seeing the great Jon Stewart, stalwart of the Democratic Party propaganda machine, conceding, as a fellow comedian and high priest of political humor, that the Trump rally comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, is actually a good comedian, and excoriating his fellow leftists for refusing to allow for the artistic license of comedy to play on the edges of incorrectness. In fact, I find Jon Stewart himself utterly unfunny. I have never watched an entire episode of any of his shows, but I have seen enough clips over the years to confirm my assumption that he is a hack or failed comic who decided that he could carve out a place for himself by pretending to be funny about current events. This is a safe avenue for a comic hoping to appeal to an audience with flattery where he lacks humor, and specifically flattery of the audience’s knee-jerk beliefs and hatreds of the moment. Stewart and Bill Maher, along with the even less funny Stephen Colbert, and subsequently followed in an avalanche of commercial opportunism by so many others of roughly equal comedic non-talent, have been boring people who see through flattery for so long that their style of entertainment has become a sub-industry unto itself, a kind of professional almshouse for people who would never make it as straight-up comedians, and who, for the same reason, also lack the intelligence and subtlety to do even the second-rate thing they have fallen back on — political op-ed humor — in a way that would have much appeal to people looking for the most meaningful thing that true comedy provides, namely a lens through which to see one’s own comfortable assumptions in an uncomfortable way, to see the foolishness in one’s own self-assurance and self-certainty.
Joseph Conrad wrote that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, because it deflates faith and certainty in favor of questions and doubts. Modern politics is nothing if not the very embodiment of primitive tribalism. But “tribal comedy” is a contradictio in adjecto.
So I clicked on the video in the Fox story accompanying that titillating headline, and watched the first five minutes or so of Tony Hinchcliffe’s MSG rally appearance. Not only did I never smile once, but in fact I was trying to resist the urge to cringe and turn it off in humiliation at the total bomb of a comedy performance that I was watching. I finally succumbed to the urge. The term “train wreck” does not begin to capture the level of failure. It was not so much that the jokes were falling flat with the audience; I think I have enough discernment and taste to decide whether a joke is funny regardless of whether it meets with approval from an audience or not, and since I have little respect for the minds and motives of modern audiences in general, I have come to expect most people to be unimpressed by the best humor, just as I would with regard to the best writing, the best painting, the best music, the best thinking. Okay, the philistines didn’t laugh — but was the joke funny? Sadly, in the case of Mr. Hinchcliffe, the answer was no, over and over again. Very few lines were even discernibly structured as proper jokes at all. None were interesting, either in set-up or concept. All were delivered without any sense of timing, and above all without any of the peculiarly vulnerable confidence that allows a comedian to stick to his guns even when the audience is oblivious. This last point probably has much to do with the reason people such as Stewart, Maher, and Colbert turned to political flattery as their style of humor: they too lacked the guts to stand up to the hatred of a disappointed crowd, so they decided to artificially load the deck in favor of crowd approval by merely carving out an audience most likely to see their jokes as affirmations of their, the audience’s, own attitudes — for of course everyone loves to imagine that he himself is funny. Hence, laughing at a tribally correct comedian allows the audience to think highly of itself.
Interestingly, one of the rare straight-up comedians of the modern era who was actually funny, and who actually made a professional practice of setting the audience on its heels rather than cajoling them with flattery, was the most brutally honest in his criticism of the kind of tribal flattery that passes for political humor today. This comedian was Norm Macdonald. During Donald Trump’s first presidential run, Macdonald was interviewed on the long-running Canadian political news program “Question Period.” The interviewer, intriguingly, was his sister-in-law, Joyce Napier. For this reason, presumably, Macdonald was unable to keep up his usual impenetrable wall of apolitical distance during the interview, which is not to say that he “took sides” in the 2016 election — far from it — but rather that he was more direct than usual in explaining his grounds for rejecting the talking-point tribalism that is being pawned off as comedy in the context of modern politics. For example, when the interviewer asks, in summary, whether “comedy in the time of Trump” is more difficult than it was during Macdonald’s time on Saturday Night Live during the Clinton years, Macdonald replies, “It’s more difficult in the time of Trump for good comedians, and it’s way easier for bad comedians.”
As much as Macdonald at his best was skilled at leaving his audience uncomfortable and unsure how to read his jokes, even while laughing at them, one can only imagine how the Jon Stewarts and Tony Hinchcliffes of the world would squirm with self-recognition — if they had the brains for it — while listening to Norm’s semi-straight talk in this interview. Now that thought makes me laugh.