Trump is funny but the act is getting stale
On the law of diminishing returns
I’ve worked with a lot of Americans; I like them but not their country. One of the things I like about Americans – and probably not all of them, to be honest, but rather the kind of idealistic, gently pedagogical Amis I’ve worked with – is their engagement with their own democratic culture. Their passion for it. Their idealism. For this kind of American, the mention of Donald Trump seems to elicit a very particular kind of uproar.
I’ve a fairly unruffled attitude to the politics of the United States; it’s not my country, I would never move there, and I’m quite content to observe its elections from afar with the fascination which befits the greatest show on earth. That distance allows me and others to acknowledge things which may not be admissible to brains stewed in partisanship, such as that Joe Biden was in evident and rapid decline; it showed the depth to which so many Americans are mired in politics as a team that stating such an evident truth became a matter of betrayal of the tribe. And from the same vantage point – allowing that neither my reproductive or voting rights are on the line – I observe that Donald Trump is a very funny man.
Now in comedy I have some expertise; I performed stand-up comedy for twenty years, I’m the former President of the Oxford Revue, and I’m the author of between six to eight viral Tweets. I have devoted my life to comedy with all the early failures and later subsequent failures that entails. And Trump makes me laugh – he has great timing, can improvise and, as a physical presence has an awkward, even raffish zaniness. If you squint just hard enough you could see Trump as a Marx Brother, though of course, his Marxism extends no further than that.
My favourite bit of his is, I’d have to say, probably the ‘Joe Biden getting a big fat shot in his ass’ number. Listen to him do it here, to the way he seeds it and, in true stand-up fashion, tries to appear like he doesn’t want to say the awful thing. Like he’s sharing the awfulness with the audience as a secret just for them.
Of course, this is humour of a certain, brutal kind; the genre of Don Rickles, Anthony Jeselenik, Gilbert Godfrey, you know, the insult comic. Punching down, as it were. Of course, the idea that good humour only ‘punches up’ for its targets is a framework which only people with no actual experience of doing comedy employ. Audiences just like the punching.
Putting this point to that same engaged American teacher often provokes uproar. ‘He’s not funny,’ they might say, ‘he’s dangerous!’ Well, yes. Exactly. A frisson of danger is brilliant for a comic. Trump is the Lord of Misrule. He leads his audience to a space where anything can be said, he symbolically ushers in a space of transgression and humiliation. His humour is absolutely central to his appeal; it is a symbolic permission for the audience to say what they really think. Or not even say what they really think, but say the things they know would piss off the people who annoy them.
Whether people can or can say what’s in their hearts, the idea that they can’t is always a powerful motivator for misbehaviour. Of course, the act in part derives its power from the idea of a lumpen mass of liberal left priggishness; a lot of the liberal left repulsion at Trump perhaps comes from the place of suspecting that there may just be something behind his jeremiads against liberal left pieties. To strenuously deny Trump’s humour then is, in itself, a confirmation of humourlessness.
I’d put forward then that Trump is a world-class comic. Absolutely one of the best I’ve ever seen – his act made him President, and you can’t say that about Jethro. His speeches work like an act in that the jokes and the recurring gags power them on. Meanwhile, the things the speeches lack, such as coherence and verisimilitude, are not dealbreakers in stand-up. Nobody comes back from a stand-up show going ‘It was funny, but sadly inaccurate.’
The other key aspect of the Trump appeal is pure demagogy, rascistisches Aufhetzen, but again, that demagoguery seems to me to largely be enabled by the darker spaces the humour has opened up.
Yet if we are to praise Trump’s political career as stand-up we have to allow that it’s subject to the same laws as stand-up too. Diminishing returns, the audience getting too familiar with the bits, a failure to match the old catchphrases with equivalent new ones. Overall, there's an increasing lack of oomph in performance, the jokes steered home less tightly, a little more between the audience and the punchline. In his recent debate with Harris, Trump didn't seem funny at all.