Trump In Office, Part Two, Day One: Silly Notes

In 2022, comedian Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live and caused quite a stir with an opening monologue that was both highly entertaining and, at moments, politically on point in the way intelligent stand-up comedy can occasionally be. On that night, the controversies he stirred up, primarily with his comments on “the Jews,” but secondarily with his refusal to do the simplistic “Trump is evil” song-and-dance that SNL has made its political stock-in-trade since 2016, were both genuinely funny and legitimately insightful. (I include a link to my comments on that monologue and its fallout here, noting that the video I embedded at the end of that previous article, featuring earlier, much better jokes about Jewish themes from former SNL cast member Norm Macdonald, has been removed for “violating YouTube’s terms of service.” Hm.)

Last weekend, two days before Trump’s second inauguration, Chappelle delivered the opening stand-up routine on SNL again. This time, very few of his jokes landed, and he relied excessively on eye-rolling looks at the audience the way a comic does when he is trying to keep an unamused crowd with him by playing “insider” with them. (Johnny Carson used to do it a lot when his jokes flopped.) Worse than the poorly conceived or weakly-delivered jokes — his way-too-long, way-too-desperate riffing on the ugliness of the Hollywood sex scandal involving the rapper P. Diddy and many of Chappelle’s friends was uncomfortable without being uncomfortably funny — was the tone of Important Comedy cum Social Commentary that dominated the routine, as though he were trying to assume the pathetic mantle of Bill Maher, the dull political comedian whose team of joke-writers can do nothing to save him from his essentially unwitty nature, and who is therefore reduced to playing the crowd on his Real Time show for approving applause — applause lines being the stand-up comedian’s admission of defeat. “I can’t make you laugh, let alone make you laugh at yourselves, so I’ll salvage my sorry act by gratifying your wish to hear your own biases and beliefs echoed in public.” Playing for applause is the comic’s version of virtue-signalling. Chappelle’s pre-Inauguration performance on SNL was increasingly mired in such non-humor, right up to his final, unironic remarks urging Donald Trump and everyone in the audience to “do better.” Physician, heal thyself.


I see that Donald Trump has used his executive pen — or rather pens, plural, since it appears he intends to outdo even his senile predecessor in signing executive orders with abandon, as if that quaint old constitutional republic thing were for the birds — to cancel John Bolton’s Secret Service protection, in spite of the fact that Bolton has been targeted by name for assassination by the Iranian regime. I am no defender of Bolton’s views, or supporter of his apparent motives, but this pettiness from Trump is the millionth superfluous reminder of the president’s essential lack of seriousness, his lack of dignity, his lack of political sobriety, his lack of unifying collegiality, and above all, his lack of manliness.


Elon Musk, the richest man in the world who now wishes to be the most powerful man in the world — and Lord save us all if he succeeds — thanked his fellow Trump worshippers for “making this happen” by flinging them his heart in a maniacal but easy-to-interpret gesticulation, immediately after shouting the words, “My heart goes out to you!” Nevertheless, a substantial chunk of the internet is trying to portray this bit of bad emoting from the billionaire who would be king as a Nazi salute, in defiance of its own eyes and common sense. Musk himself is actively helping to make social media and artificial intelligence even more insidious dangers to mankind than they already were. And yet the monster Musk would strengthen is today demonstrating its ability to swallow reason and civility in the very act of smearing Musk as a Nazi. But this bit of poetic justice does not make him a Nazi, nor his awkward, nerdy gesturing some sort of white supremacist dog whistle. He isn’t, and it wasn’t, quite obviously. 

Everyone in America needs to hit the showers and cool off for a while. Thirty years might suffice. 


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