Not fair! Only liberals are allowed to make fun of conservatives. That's the way it has always been so when someone like Donald Trump jokes about liberals it is absolutely intolerable. Not only is it offensive but dangerous since jokes won the election for Trump.
That pretty much sums up the attitude of New Yorker television critic, Emily Nussbaum, in her January 23 article. Somehow it is just not right that liberals are mocked. Nussbaum is so upset by this cultural turnaround that she even attributes it to making Trump's victory possible as you can see in the title of her article, How Jokes Won The Election:
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Since November 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes—dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity.
...I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—that meant freedom for everyone.
But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur.
...By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?
This hits a little harder for Nussbaum, since she donated $250 to Hillary Clinton. So do all those jokes by liberals at the expense of conservatives for all those many years in the past also count as disinformation? Nussbaum is silent on this but she draws a bizarre dark parallel between Trump and Catskills comics:
The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.
Huh? So guys like Henny Youngman were "dark and angry men?" And all that time I thought they were just performing harmless shtick. Silly me.
“Buh-leeve me, buh-leeve me!” Trump said in his act, again and again.
What was really funny about that was Tim Kaine's pathetic impression of it at the Democrat Convention last summer. It was so bad it was actually hilarious. Buh-leeve me!
The extent of Nussbaum's obsession that jokes won the election for Trump continues for many more thousands of words in which she invokes South Park, Mad Men, and even a British television show. Of course, if a liberal candidate in the future somehow jokes his way to the White House I somehow doubt it would inspire all this hand wringing by Nussbaum.
Oh and here is a collection of Trump humor that helped him win the election. However, a trigger warning for Emily Nussbaum: viewing this video could cause you to fall into a deep funk once again which could result in yet another overlong angst-ridden article.
