A few months ago, I asked philosopher why anti-Trump humor always seemed to fail. She came up with a brilliant essay, “The Jester’s Power,” which is still current and worth reading. But now that South Park has decided to point its comedic arsenal at the president, I thought it would be the perfect time for her to revisit the topic of political satire.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
During Trump’s first term, there was a designated White House staffer whose job it was to sing: specifically, to play the sorts of songs known to calm and soothe the losses of temper that Trump often, it seems, experienced. Any small or large sort of thing, being crossed, double-crossed, insulted apparently or insulted for real, even just being bored or out of sorts and of course, screaming through various sorts of rages, all these could be an occasion to hit play on various showtunes of choice — Andrew Lloyd Webber’s barn-burner from Cats, you know the one, Barbra Streisand covers it (it’s the one about memory). On occasion, Trump would ask for the guy himself. “Go get the music man,” the staffer reports that he would say.
Aside from his fear of falling down stairs, a fear I share, it is this detail about the designated man for music that I find most sympathetic about Trump. His soul is in a sad condition, and happy the man who can be at least temporarily soothed by song. As Plato describes it in the Republic, the tyrannical soul cannot sleep; the man who has fed, taunted and grown his native desire for people and things to the point of madness — the better, as he thinks, to triumph over the rest of everything up to and including the gods themselves — he can’t rest. It is the very condition of tyranny to be the most dissatisfied of men, and unfortunately, the condition is terminal.
Two weeks ago, in an attempt to poke just this sort of the savage beast, the folks at South Park offered up the first episode in the latest installment of their comedic and satirical show, featuring in extended and scurrilous fashion Trump himself. It was well received by many, record-breakingly so, if not by the current White House spokesman, who gasped out something about “uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.” Well perhaps, although again, on the whole it seems to have been enjoyed, with the president of the non-profit FIRE writing in praise of it and of the “special role of comedy in a free society.”
But to me, the episode seemed aimed less at me, one viewer among many within the teetering rule of law, than the television-watcher-in-chief, up late at night en suite in DC, flipping the channels and illuminated by passing lights, treated to seeing an image of himself likewise in bed, on the screen; only this time, with Satan, attempting to talk Satan into just a little bit more sex. What did he, Trump, think? The episode was most violent about what it seemed to hope were his weakest points, size of his genitalia and so on, presumably in the attempt to operate as an inverse sort of music-man, to raise rather than soothe the temper, to double-dare cancellation for themselves, just for the sheer hell of it. It felt courageous, partly at least, and probably was. Did it get the goat it was written for? Well, perhaps.
In May, I wrote for Wisdom of Crowds about my love of a seventeenth-century French playwright (thanks, guys) and his approach to the kind of satire and humor that, slow-burning, say a century or two later, is the kind of thing that leads to the toppling of kings. One problem is that not every kind of humor is actually funny enough to do this. And unfortunately, the American world is saturated in just the kind of humor that is definitively not — the way you can tell is that people routinely describe it as “hilarious,” but without actually feeling moved to laugh. What they mean is something more like “so right,” to them at least. As one WoC commenter put it, American humor is balm for the already-converted, and certainly most things, the Comedy Central shows, Stewart old and new, are exactly that, though if they function as balm I can’t say that it seems to last that long.
In 2005, 2006 or so, I was young and hanging out with people who worked for Democrats in Congress, and while they wanted the kind of relief from losing, from the Iraq war and the Patriot Act that the Daily Show seemed to provide, and something more like truth-telling I suppose, what it resulted in was a static sense of self-superiority, marked by a kind of guttural hunching of the shoulders, the same kind of laughter that the South Park characters are best known for; and not in any kind of practical political action at all. Was Colbert’s late-night version cancelled because it was funny, or because it was not funny enough? I can’t say for sure, but the thing is, to me it seems that while Colbert himself remains an interesting human being, the schtick and the humor his current show engendered wasn’t funny enough to merit cancellation. The problem is that it was flattery, really not much more, and unfortunately it seems to have flattered the audience it didn’t have. Predictably, its cancellation engendered a flurry of humorless tweets, insisting that, in a democracy, comedy is so important.
What the South Park episode was supposed to be about was shaming Trump. But unfortunately, I think it probably may have simply flattered him instead. Things like this feed the importance of the satirized one, the guy you are trying to make fun of, by clothing him even while naked with the force of your attention. As a character in Plato also remarks, what’s more pleasant than an image of yourself? And so I think Parker and Stone failed just where they most wished to succeed: angry themselves, devil-may-care in the court of the king, their jokes create that very court, calling into existence the glamor of the president-king. Congrats guys, you’ve reinvented the levée.
The best part of the episode, by contrast, was the subplot of the character Cartman, who was bummed when woke-NPR was cancelled, to the point of self-murder, because he couldn’t get to feel gruntingly contemptuous enough anymore. Woke is Dead, read his new Nietzschean t-shirt; admitting that in a way, woke had been the best god he had ever had. Within such a joke, one may see oneself if one wishes; Colbert too is dead, and long live Colbert.
So here is the genre-problem we have: How on earth do we break out of the humor of self-satisfaction, and grant ourselves the relief of the soul-shaking laughter that contains within it the possibility of better things? Part of the issue is, formally speaking, the form: South Park often manages better and more sustained jokes because it has narrative form, one that depends on characters you know, and with a real formal plot. Real plots develop and bring out more and more memorable humor, even over the course of twenty minutes, than just the evening’s best one-liners, or another stupid and forgettable sketch. The Cartman plot ends when despite his best efforts to kill his friend and himself with exhaust fumes, he’s gone and forgotten again that his parents are in receipt of an electric car. That’s stomach-twistingly funny, and so is the guidance-counselor-turned-ICE-agent from episode no. 2; both are more memorable in the long view than (forgive me) a petite talking penis; genitalia are funny but only for a brief moment.
And formally speaking, this next point is yet more important still: humor that makes fun of the other guy, but not you as well, is formally insufficient, aesthetically and psychologically. A good joke cuts both ways, and includes the teller’s faults within it; like Chris Rock’s joke about the difference between having money and being wealthy (the trick is to avoid diamonds, and on occasion, rims), you can’t make fun of aspirationally-oligarchical waste without admitting your own temptations and failures. South Park’s conceit, where the kids are the ones who have it right, likewise requires that we the adult viewers are forever in the wrong; and so no one is ever seriously at dramatic risk of being either. But when you leave yourself out, you, rational and political actor, fully grown, citizen in this time and place, maybe partly right and definitely partly wrong, the joke is over before it begins. Perhaps this is why, as in the second episode, the only hero possible to imagine is a canine, shot on his way to the rescue; the narrative omniscience made possible by cash and libertarianism remains untroubled. Truth be told, while doing the voices yourself adds much, there’s still something to the practical aspect of acting the joke out yourself, face to face, rather than have cartoons do it for you. Molière died less than an hour after making it through a performance of The Hypochondriac, truly nearly dead on his feet. He also wrote a joke about his favorite ribbons into the plot and hero of his best-known show, The Misanthrope, where he had to walk on stage as that guy, ribbon-adorned, each night; it’s also what comedians risk onstage at Kill Tony.
Real humor, the engendering kind, implicates you in the joke. There’s always something funny about us in what annoys us, and the same goes for what irritates us about tyrants as well. Unless we and our comedians figure out how to do this, rather than keeping on trying to, impossibly, shame the shameless, we too are goners. If I had to hire a music man, a new late show guy, or a story-teller for the demos, that’s the kind I’d pick. Much more than we want, politics depends on who we pick next.
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"Real humor, the engendering kind, implicates you in the joke." Yes this. I'd heard about the South Park bit but hadn't seen it until I clicked on the link here. Meh. (Of course I never watched Colbert either.) Mary Townsend's point here is real. If you feel self satisfied, you haven't accomplished anything.
This reminds me of something Phil Christman wrote recently over in his Substack: writing about what makes movies like Airplane and Naked Gun funny, he pointed out:
"Pamela Anderson costars in the new Naked Gun, and at this point her ability to do “attractive woman who is in on the joke that she reduces men to drooling idiocy” is … I mean, nobody will ever beat Marilyn Monroe at that game but it’s not an insult to Marilyn to mention Pam in the same sentence. I find this honestly sort of moving, given what being hot has cost Pamela Anderson in terms of indignity, public humiliation, violation of privacy, misunderestimation and so on. Her funniest moments in this film are just extravagantly goofy."
This kind of self-implicating humor is both brutally honest and deeply generous at the same time: which I'd like to think is why it can succeed at actually being disarming enough to help us see both ourselves and whatever monstrosity it mocks with non-defensive, non-murderous clarity? Anyway: I loved this piece. Thanks so much!