Did you hear the one about the Electoral College? Turns out it’s just another fake school, like Trump University.
Or the one about what Hillary and Bill said to the woman they met walking in the woods after the election? “Could you give us a hand with this body?”
If a bitter pill goes down easier with a laugh, a prolonged regimen of unpalatable medicine would be unbearable without high-test comic relief. And so, since November 9, I’ve placed myself under the care of the most distinguished specialists in the field.
America’s leading humorists, including Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Garrison Keillor, Andy Borowitz, and the cast of Saturday Night Live, have lifted my spirits and regulated my perspective on the presidential election one joke, comedy sketch, parody and satirical essay at a time.
On days when Trump’s cabinet choices are announced, I supplement Colbert—“There’s a trend out there of Donald Trump appointing people to head things they’re against. I’m looking forward to Surgeon General Joe Camel”— with political cartoons, social media memes and text messages from friends in the same leaky canoe as I.
Deconstructing humor is like doing an autopsy on a live patient. That’s what humor writing classes are for, and nobody goes away laughing from those. (The opener about the Clintons in the woods pokes a stick at tin-foil hat, anti-Clinton conspiracies. See, now the gag’s dead.) So, let’s talk fundamental theory and leave the innards in situ.
Humor has rules, and breaking them has predictable consequences. For instance, high value subjects are powerful people behaving badly: abusing their authority, bullying their lessers, lying, stealing, covering up — oh, let us count the ways they dishonor the positions they hold. However, ridiculing those lower in the pecking order than you isn’t funny. It’s just mean.
Example: Alec Baldwin’s parody of Trump’s tweets, within bounds. Trump tweeting about a Latina Miss Universe he called “Miss Piggy,” out-of-bounds. Baldwin simply amuses or annoys, depending on your opinion of the notable he’s impersonating, but Trump’s fit of pique bore the marks of petty, malicious retribution.
His victory stung. Ninety-some of my Facebook friends answered yes when I asked, on the day after the election, if they, like I, had cried more than once. The response likely would have been higher had some not been caught up in the fierce urgency to restock their liquor cabinets.
I called a friend who was as bummed as I was. She had allowed her daughter to stay home from school. Their family had been up late watching the returns, the outcome was a blow, plus the daughter wasn’t in any mood for more verbal arrows from her fellow students for supporting Clinton.
What if, the teenager asked her mother as they awaited the candidate’s concession speech, Hillary came out wearing slept-in sweats, mascara-stained face, hair a mess, a Make America Great Again cap cocked sideways?
Morning-after dark roast, brewed fresh from native wit and the agony of defeat. Delicious.
Gary Burbank, for many years a tri-state, afternoon staple on 700 WLW-AM, told his writers that we saved lives. Take the average Joe or Jane, driving home after a crummy day at work: The hometown team is having a lousy season, there are wars and rumors of wars, and goodness knows where the money for a new furnace is supposed to come from.
Then they turned up the radio and heard one of Gary’s characters, Gilbert Gnarley, say, or Howlin’ Blind Muddy Slim, maybe a fake phone call from then First Lady Hillary Clinton, and by the time Joe or Jane got home, they were feeling better.
If they hugged the kids instead of kicking the dog, we had done our job.
I miss that creative outlet, especially now, when political comedy writing is like shooting orange koi in a barrel.
Even Time Magazine is getting in on the act, with their Man of the Year issue, featuring Trump on the cover, with the “M” in TIME over his head like devil horns.
As President John F. Kennedy said, “There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third.”
Mary Thomas Watts lives and writes in Wilmington.
