The irresistible comedic value of Trump
Whether we find his humour amusing or offensive, the spectacle is compelling enough to keep us watching
Jemima Kelly
© Ben HickeyTrying to work out whether it is more likely that Donald Trump will be behind bars or behind the Oval Office desk in two years’ time is a tricky calculation.
It’s slightly easier to predict who will be the Republican presidential nominee: although it’s too early to crown him, Trump is leaving his rivals in the dust.
Second-favourite Ron DeSantis, who was leading the race in some early polls at the end of last year, has now plunged down the ratings: in the RealClearPolitics poll average, DeSantis is at 21.5 per cent, while Trump is at 52.
In one recent poll Trump was given a 45-point lead over DeSantis: 59 per cent to the latter’s 14 per cent.
“DeSanctimonious . . . he’s doing good — he’s falling like a rock!” Trump joked to an adoring crowd in Michigan on Sunday, using a nickname he has coined for the Florida governor (Trump’s list of sobriquets for rivals and enemies is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page).
“People are getting to know him, they know he’s got no personality.
You’ve got to have a little personality — not much, but a little.”
Love him or despise him — and it tends to be one or the other — the same cannot be said of Trump.
If there’s one thing the former president does have, it’s personality.
It’s not that he’s likeable.
No, Trump has a much rarer gift: he’s funny.
His opponents, aware of this, have been trying to show they are in possession of a sense of humour, too, but it is not altogether clear that’s true.
DeSantis’s attempt to seem like a man-of-the-people at a car show in Iowa last month, jerking his head back unnaturally to guffaw in a strange manner when a man told him that he didn’t want to know how much his 1955 Porsche cost, ended up going viral as an example of someone trying far too hard.
Joe Biden, after using a humblebraggy, not-very-good, favourite joke by introducing himself as “Jill Biden’s husband”, made an even worse one as he welcomed actress Eva Longoria to the White House garden earlier this month: “We’ve known each other a long time — she was 17, I was 40.”
(Longoria would have actually been seven when Biden was 40.)
A few people could be heard laughing awkwardly.
With Trump, the laughter is genuine.
In a 2016 paper, three anthropologists from the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Texas at Austin argued it was the fact that Trump was so entertaining, above all else, that won him the Republican nomination that year.
Whether Americans found his jokes amusing or offensive, the spectacle was compelling enough to keep them watching, and — crucially — to keep him in the news.
Donna Goldstein, one of the paper’s co-authors, tells me that Trump is a product of the New York comedy scene he grew up around, where crude, gestural humour reigns.
“There’s something about that ‘bodiness’ and crudeness that politics was missing before Trump,” she says.
“And the ability to say something real was more limited. Trump broke out of that mould.”
As Goldstein points out, Trump often gestures the end of his gags rather than saying them out loud, a trick that not only allows him to have plausible deniability — because of course he didn’t mean what you’re saying he did — but that also allows his crowd to feel like they’re clever for knowing what he intends; they’re in on the joke.
Comedy is a great equaliser, which helps explain why Trump’s constant ridiculing of others is so effective in galvanising supporters: when he cracks crude or outrageous jokes, Trump is not only entertaining his fans, but also showing them that he does not consider himself morally superior, giving them a sense they are part of his special club.
Trump’s comedy is not always intentional, of course — anyone who watched him react to the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died, live on camera, while Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” blasted over the speakers in front of Air Force One, could see that.
But it doesn’t really matter either way: we want to laugh — it makes us feel good.
And in a ready-to-be-offended, trigger-warning-laden world, someone who doesn’t care about staying within the realms of acceptability, especially one who has such good comic timing, stands out.
And it makes him a major electoral threat.
The idea that Trump will manage to get back into office might be, for many of us, a distinctly unfunny one.
But sometimes laughter is all we have.
As Abraham Lincoln — a president who was also known for making jokes, though of a different kind — once said, “I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all.”
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