There’s Nothing Funny about Donald Trump

A big orange baby. Cheeto-in-Chief. The concept of overly pursed lips. You give a thousand comedians a thousand laptops and this is what you get. But it’s not comedy’s fault Donald Trump isn’t funny. He hasn’t been funny in four years and our constant need to squeeze humor from this nightmare has proved exhausting and futile. Trust me when I say I absolutely do not want to hear another Trump joke.

Despite what everyone’s most annoying coworker told us, we knew Trump was actually bad for comedy. Lord knows that has not stopped anyone from trying though. With the president in the news every day, the need to mock him follows. The problem is supply is meeting demand a little too well. There’s no more gold to mine.

Unlike most political candidates, we knew Donald Trump as a punchline and a civilian well before his campaign. He was an easy, go-to impression like Christopher Walken or JFK. And like Walken, there’s nothing fresh about a new Trump impression. He’s a hacky subject.

Part of the problem is that Trump comedy is mainstream, which doesn’t inherently make it subpar, but like many things, the over commodification of mainstream ideas often leads to a flattening of content. The product becomes overly broad and gutless in favor of being more accessible. Instead of speaking truth to power, it’s about speaking to Dave in Branson, Missouri.

Again, we’ve always known Trump as a joke, but he also held the unique position of being someone frequently let in on the joke. His Comedy Central Roast was an invitation to laugh with us. His hosting gig on SNL was an invitation into the cool kids’ club alongside Tom Hanks, Melissa McCarthy, and Alec Baldwin, the very man who would erroneously win an Emmy impersonating him. His inclusion in such iconic comedic institutions renders the later mockery fruitless. If you let him in the club you can’t suddenly kick him out and think your comedy can serve as an effective dagger into the heart of his appeal. What leg do you have to stand on after you let him sit on your couch?

Some of this content doesn’t even bother to transform his garbage into something new. The Tik Tok trend of creating content around unedited soundbites of Trump, popularised by comedian Sarah Cooper, has proven to be very popular but ultimately it’s all an empty offering. These videos take his words verbatim as users lip sync along, sprinkling in some crazy eyes and cringy smiles and calling it a day. That’s not an impression, that’s fascist karaoke.

The actual impressions we’ve been subjected to have become devoid of standards. You don’t need nuance or an uncanny vocal inflection anymore, you just need a frizzy wig, too much bronzer, and to purse your lips like you’re trying to expel them from your face. Baldwin’s Emmy is about as pure an example of giving a trophy to the most famous face in the room there ever was as his big head is about all that brings him close to a likeness of Trump. Unlike Darrell Hammond’s rudimentary impression, there was a silliness to the simpleness, but he also satirized almost a completely different person. He impersonated a version of Trump better known by his weirdest traits instead of his ugliest. And that’s a big issue; we know too much about him to accept such a narrow and sanitized portrait of the man today.

A Trump impression has to be spot-on to work or else it feels lifeless and wasteful at best and tasteless and tone-deaf at worst. Even Anthony Atamanuik’s Trump, the definitive portrayal, lost all appeal after the election (save for his truck bit from The President Show). Part of what made Antamanuik and James Adomian’s cross-country Trump vs Bernie show so entertaining was that Trump’s words, while real, were perceived by most (in hindsight, naively) as no more than a ridiculous stunt from a powerless individual, a political wannabe that will be neutralized if we do the right thing on election day. But that hope waned and both the parody and real campaigns went on. Even Atamanuik seemed to sense some direness during a live show in Atlanta I attended. After feeling tension from the audience after comparing Trump’s rhetoric to Nazism, he somewhat broke character to address the audience. Still with his patented Trump affectation in his voice, the comedian warned the audience clearly as himself that if these words are disturbing then the fact the real Trump is saying them should worry us more.

For many people, election night 2016 flipped a switch. Whether you woke up that day morbidly firm in your prediction for how the night would end or desperately hanging on to a shred of optimism, this shit suddenly became real. Suddenly, Trump stopped being funny.

Was he ever funny? No, not really. Yes, his hair is dumb. Yes, he sits weird and wears suits two sizes too big, but that’s surface level. He’s always been awful, but so are a lot of things we joke about (9/11, Hitler, cancer, etc.). But a joke is not inherently entertaining or useful just by being a joke. Comedy requires context and the context accompanying Trump jokes often nullifies their impact.

Since the election, new Trump jokes are dead on arrival, each feeling overdone as soon as they’re spoken. You can’t satirize a man who’s self-parodying, and it’s impossible to overlook the atrocities he’s inflicted upon this country in dazzling stupid fashion in favor of a laugh. It’s not that comedy is not wanted or needed during this time, but that it’s hard to be in the headspace for the subject matter anymore. It’s airplane humor being sold to plane crash survivors on day 1,386 on the deserted island.