This month, I want to talk about comedy, a topic that’s very close to my heart.
It seems like there are comedians everywhere these days, and yet, almost nothing is funny. Part of the reason may be that everything is so politicized. With so much anger and grievance, can anything be funny?
I think yes, but for most people—even professional comedians—making jokes has become risky.
As journalist M. Gessen recently pointed out, people need comedy because it helps us cope, to reduce overwhelming seriousness to the absurd.
Reductio ad absurdum is actually one of my favorite forms of argument. As you might guess, it literally means, “reduction to the absurd.” It is comedy as argument—a way to prove a point by showing that its opposite is, basically, a joke.
(L’esprit de l’escalier, or stairway wit, is another favorite of mine, not from Latin but the French. It refers to thinking up a great comeback after the moment has passed.)
Comedy’s ability to create clarity—even moral clarity, even through puerility!—is why autocrats fear it. Gessen uses the example of Vladimir Putin taking a popular Russian comedy show off the air because it made him look grotesque. In such a climate, grotesquery is not just temporary relief but an act of resistance—an exercise of power.
Gessen points out that you see the same impulse in the Trump administration’s disproportionate response to Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue. Or was the response disproportionate? Viewed another way, we might see the response as an official estimation of comedy’s power. Perhaps it has more power than we think.
Backlash to jokes is not just a partisan phenomenon, of course. Many on the left have tried to deplatform comedians who “punch down”—that is, mock or dehumanize, often cruelly, people who are already struggling. I tend to agree about punching down—but not because I’m easily offended or censorious. Rather, it’s because jokes that punch down aren’t good jokes.
As a comedian, you need to know where your joke lands on the spectrum of shocking to sublime. Jokes that punch down may shock, and shock can certainly cause laughter. But sublime jokes reveal something big, mind-boggling, transcendent. Jokes that punch down tend to reveal something small: usually, the comedian. Nobody’s face hurts after listening to a litany of jokes that punch down.
I think Trump’s true historic first, above all else, may be that he’s our first comedian president. At heart, I think he is an insult comic dog, even if his heart is wiener dog-sized. You’d be hard-pressed to invent a figure more tragicomic than him.
But Trump is also a sort of a mutant: he is a comedian with a feral, vicious impulse that even the most offensive comics don’t tend to have.
Still, Trump inherently knows the one thing all comedians need to know in order to succeed: you can’t besmirch a turd. Paradoxically, Trump’s antics make it impossible to reduce him to the absurd. The fact that people keep trying seems to actually help him. Like the slime in Ghostbusters II, negative energy makes Trump more powerful.
Grievance is a big motivator for Trump, and in turn, for his opposition—but without the same effect. Things don’t work well when everyone is 100% aggrieved all the time, or when one party is aggrieved and thinks everything is a joke, and the other is aggrieved and thinks everything is deadly serious (as it may well be). Both Republican and Democrat voters surely have some valid grievances. I know No-Party-Preference voters like me do, and my main grievance is with Republican and Democrat leaders.
My heart, which is probably enlarged now that I’m in my 40s, is with The Onion, America’s Finest News Source. The New York Times may be the best, but The Onion is the finest.
The Onion enjoys the same immunity as the President, but with the bonus of not making me feel degraded. The revitalized Onion—now in print again—is the funniest its ever been. LOLs are guaranteed, or your money back.* You can and should subscribe here. It’s just a hundred bucks for 12 issues.
As you might guess, The Onion’s secret is that it has no expectations of respectability. It makes some really offensive jokes, but it punches up to sublime heights, not down, to mash its fist into... never mind.
There’s something about The Onion in print that makes me want to share pictures of it with friends, even more so than when I see it online. There’s just something extra funny about the newspaper. I think you’ll agree. Of course, you can also read it alone and LOL to yourself at the most offensive stuff without anyone knowing—I think you’ll find yourself doing that too.
No matter what, The Onion can be your cure for at least a few minutes.
Try it and tell me if I’m wrong.
*I’m not authorized to make that promise.
Quotes
This month I want to share quotes from four writers I deeply admire, who all showed up with great force and clarity in September: Jamelle Bouie, Roxane Gay, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Ta-Nehisi Coates (via Ezra Klein).
“If the aim of one faction is to dominate all the others — if the explicit goal is to curb the rights of its opponents and force them to submit to conditions of political inequality — then discussion is less useful than a willingness to defend liberal society in the face of tyranny and despotism… “Neither Trump nor the MAGA right wants to discuss or deliberate; it wants to dominate. American politics is no longer a fight over policy; it is a fight over the character of the nation itself. The task of this moment, then, is to defend the old vision of a more perfect union — of a more democratic and egalitarian American republic — not hope that one can avoid the fight by having the right conversation.” — Jamelle Bouie, The MAGA movement is not a debating society
“In the fantasy of civility, if we are polite about our disagreements, we are practicing politics the right way. If we are polite when we express bigotry, we are performing respectability for people whom we do not actually respect and who, in return, do not respect us. The performance is the only thing that matters. … “As a writer, as a person, I do not know how to live and write and thrive in a world where working for decency and fairness and equity can be seen as incivility, where it can result in threats on my life, or those of my family; where I worry about a rogue Supreme Court trying to legally nullify my marriage; where I worry about my neighbors and community who are vulnerable to unchecked power. I worry and I worry and I worry and I feel helpless and angry and tired but also recognize that doing nothing is not an acceptable choice.“Every single day, I read the news, and I can hardly process it all. I keep wondering when we will reach a cultural breaking point, when finally, the Trump administration will go far enough to shove us out of the comforts of our day-to-day lives. I look at our elected leaders, especially the Democratic ones, and hardly recognize them. I’ve written, many times, about how no one is coming to save us, but I never imagined that our leaders would agree, that they would comply with so much in advance, that they would rely as a political strategy more on embracing conservative policies than standing up for progressive ones. — Roxane Gay, Civility Is a Fantasy
“When Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, bemoaned that only two of the 58 Democrats who refused to sign the resolution honoring Kirk were white, Laura Loomer responded on X by railing against ‘ghetto Black bitches who hate America serving in Congress.’ Loomer is not merely some right-wing provocateur. She has the ear of the president of the United States and understood that such an explicitly racist comment in 2025 America would bring no political consequence. …“The number of Democrats and esteemed American institutions that have engaged in the mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse, a phenomenon we have not witnessed since the civil rights era.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed
“The idea that this guy should be in any way celebrated for how he conducted politics — the fact that he just slurred, across the board, all sorts of groups of people and then ran an organization which appeared, to me, to be just a haven of hatred — I would not want that to be a model for my politics. … “I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance and warmth are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s a powerful, unifying force. And I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger. … “People get activated by hate. It’s a very, very, very strong force. So I don’t think it requires you to feel that you’ll eventually lose. On the contrary, I think it requires you to feel that even if you do lose, you have this steadfastness to keep going. … “When I hear or see people who are honored and commemorated in such a way that they almost become a national religious figure, and then I see their content, and I see that their content is actively destructive to humanity, I have to draw a line there. — Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines
Last month’s shuffle
Each month, I put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that caught my ear. Some are familiar to me, some aren’t. Some are old, some are new. The playlist tends to span eras, genres, and sounds. It’s probably not for everyone but here it is!
2024