Georges Bataille’s prose reminds me of a fairground rubber mask; the kind where you stick your fingers through the eye holes and twist it into hundreds of leering, meaningless faces. He had a vast number of interests—psychoanalysis, critical theory, eroticism, politics, economics, anthropology—and they were intricately woven through his work to the point where you can interpret his books as saying almost anything. The Story of the Eye has been read as Sadean pornography, a philosophical treatise, a Roman a’clef with details drawn from Bataille’s own life, etc, but I’m struck by the sense that nobody really knows what it’s about. Everyone just brings their own baggage to it.
Bataille is God’s gift to people who want to sanctify some mad theory they brewed in the radiator with vague Smart Person quotes. “As seen through the lens of [dead French philosopher]’s [out-of-context theory], Beyonce has more rizz than Cardi B”—if you get paid to write stuff like that, Bataille’s your guy. But would Bataille have agreed with these theories? Some surrealists sculpted worlds like private gardens and gave outsiders no way in. Bataille is the reverse. His books are often all key and no lock.
Blue of Noon is typically obscure. My impression is that it’s a pornographic narrative dealing with the underclass of society, and the way they essentially preview death before the rest of us (lucky bastards). It starts literally in the gutter—a couple of drunks laughing and fighting and embarrassing themselves—and ends with fascism looming, the Hitler Youth marching in the street, and nations about to topple into abysms of war and fire.
There’s a kind of symmetry there. Bataille wrote the book in 1935 or 1939 (I have heard both dates), but it wasn’t published until 1957, long after World War II had ended. Like a doctor’s warning to quit drinking that got held up in the mail and arrived after the patient had died of liver failure.
We begin mise en scène. Perhaps mise en abyme. The setting is mid-30s London. Henri Troppmann (“Drip Man”??) and his girlfriend Dorothy are getting drunk at some dive. They are both feverishly sick—lengthy prose descriptions emphasize their filth, their depravity. They are alive in a consumed, rancid, rotting sense that closely resembles death. Their conversations are mad and unmotivated nonsense, such as Dorothy’s garbled memory of her mother on the elevator. We’re watching two lost people who are circling the drain. Dorothy is incontinent, and Henri is sexually impotent. They are unhappy together or apart.
The word for these characters is “abject”. They are at the bottom of society, like the figures Bataille wrote about in his famous essay Abjection and Miserable Forms. The filth and vomit are status markers counting them “out” of respectable bourgeoise society, just as a fine suit is a marker counting you in.[1]Are they really abject? They seem to have a lot of money—Henri bribes some service workers into to helping Dorothy after she soils herself, for example. I’m struck that a lot of Marxist … Continue reading
The ultimate form of abjection, of course, is death: which is the book’s main subject. It’s filled with subtle, and not so subtle nods, that Henri and his friends might be close to the end—or perhaps even beyond it. Like this:
Before being wholly affected by drink, we had managed to retreat to a room at the Savoy. Dirty [Dorothy] had noticed that the elevator attendant was very ugly (in spite of his handsome uniform, you might have taken him for a gravedigger.)
Later, Henri receives a letter from his wife. It’s very strange, worded in a way that suggests he is already deceased.
Lazare took me home. She came in with me. I asked her to let me read a letter from my wife which I found waiting for me. The letter was eight to ten pages long. My wife said she couldn’t go on any longer. She blamed herself for losing me, yet everything that had happened had been my fault.
There’s no reason to write a letter to a dead man, and his wife knows he’s alive (she later attempts to phone him), but “she blamed herself for losing me” is a striking choice of words But it seems to me that most of the characters aren’t meant to be humans so much as the embodiment of societal, historical, and psychoanalytical concepts. Such as when Henri dreams he is trapped in a dystopian Russia—a barren wasteland of factories and warehouses, ruled by a woman called “Lenova”.
(As a child, I’d always heard that “Lenin” meant “man of iron”, and Stalin had adopted his own name—”man of steel” to upstage him. But apparently both sides of that are wrong. “Iron” in Russian is железо/zhelezo, and Lenin’s name comes from the river Lena, in the land of his Cossack ancestors. The reason for Stalin’s choice of name is unknown but was probably just a homage. Nothing to do with the book, of course. I just thought that was interesting.)
I guess you’re getting a sense of how Blue of Noon is written: very dreamy and slipstreamy and loose. Characters are impressionistic studies. Events are freighted with symbolic baggage. It’s only 150 pages long but feels accordionlike, as though it could be collapsed far smaller, or expanded far longer, without really becoming any different. Take it for what it is: a weird, out-of-focus snapshot from a man staring off the edge.
Neither the wife nor Lenova appear in the story. Many other women do, though. One is Dorothy. Another is Xenie. Another is a “skinny, sallow-fleshed Jewess” called Lazare, whose name reminds us of the Biblical figure of Lazarus. That figure, of course, is famous for not being dead, and Lazare is the book’s most conspicuously living figure. She’s a saber-rattling Marxist activist who Henri seems terrified by, as though she’s a light shining into all his hollow spaces. But even she seems haunted by death. After all, where did the Bolshevik revolutions end up?
Near the end of the book, when it’s obvious that war is coming—a rictus spasm of violence that everyone fears and secretly relishes—Henri overcomes his impotence, and has sex with Dorothy over a graveyard, while pondering his own death. I was reminded of the way the penis of a corpse will fill with blood. Soon, with Germany firmly Nazified, Henri tries to flee…to France. That was funny. He can’t run. Not from Nazi Germany, not from death, not even from who he ultimately is.
The book moves at whirlwind pace, although it’s not always clear where it’s going. There are little flashbacks and side stories and detours. It really captures how memories feel from a time when you were drinking heavily: like a card deck shuffled out of order. There’s quite a few references to then-contemporary things that would have seemed quite out of date by 1957, like Austrian singer-actress Lotte Lenya, and the Bal Tabarin cabaret in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, and even the eruption of Krakatoa, which was still within living memory in 1935/1939.
Blue of Noon contains necrophilia. Henri has sex with his mother’s dead body (or attempts to). This bizarrely pathological act (which doesn’t even appear on the page) seems to be the one thing people know about the book (the way that nobody remembers a damned thing about The Master and the Margarita except Belphegor the cat). But what’s more interesting is the way Henri behaves toward his own necrophilia: while bragging about necrophilia, he also lies about it to Lazare, hiding the identity of the corpse. Even while admitting to something horrendous, he’s still spin-doctoring the truth; trying to salvage his reputation. I suppose that’s true to how people behave in real life. If you’re caught stealing a million dollars, admit to stealing nine hundred thousand. Who knows, you might still make out with a hundred large!
The book takes stabs at politics. It also takes stabs at body horror and dysmorphia and the dissolution of boundaries and many other things. It’s prime-time Bataille, in other words, firing ideas around like lethal buckshot. There are fantastic runs of surrealist prose. There’s also a sense of gutter-mouthed profanity that reads more like Tropic of Cancer than anything. Did the translator take liberties with the book?
Bataille’s prose seems to teem with wild horses, stamping the ground, nostrils flaring, ready to gallop in any direction. Perhaps over the reader. Yet if you have a strong stomach, Blue of Noon is worth reading. It’s a strange and surreal look at the past. Maybe the present and future, too.
The excessive descriptions of bodily fluids might be off-putting, but really, it’s like a fractal: you zoom out, but the picture remains the same: a diseased churn that foretells approaching disaster for everyone. The body starts to die, the nation starts to die. An act of vomiting is a match cut for the Beer Hall Putsch. Like Sade, Bataille was good at taking the affairs of the body and expanding them outside it, projecting them onto society at large. Hangover diarrhoea is caused by a drinking binge. But you did not go on a drinking binge for no reason, but because you were, on some deep level, unhappy. A person who puts poison into their body is a person who wants to die. And what causes that feeling, apart from (ultimately) the society you live in? Everything in the world is twisted together, a braid tightly-woven from the obnubilation of shadow. It’s often unclear what’s wrong with the world, but once you start throwing up, it’s undeniable thatthere is something wrong.
Maybe that’s the core of Bataille’s whole deal. He studied abjected things. The waste, the filth, the rejectamenta of body and society. The haruspices of Ancient Rome sought to learn deep truths by inspecting entrails. Bataille was a haruspex of society’s shit and vomit.
Are they really abject? They seem to have a lot of money—Henri bribes some service workers into to helping Dorothy after she soils herself, for example. I’m struck that a lot of Marxist critical theory is left in an odd position by capitalism, where theoretically anyone with money can buy their way into society, regardless of what status markers they do or don’t have.
Are they leaning into the “Pixar mom” meme at this point? I only ask because Little Bo Peep has a dump truck four times as big as the rest of her body.
Anyway, it’s another Pixar movie starring toys and crap. All your favorites are here, and they’ve never looked better. The animation is just stupendous. Look at that god damn rain at the beginning—relax, guys. I kind of feel like you’re showing off at this point. The human characters look great, full of warmth and personality and emotion. The biggest weakness of the Toy Story franchise was how the people tended to resemble plastic toys themselves, and that’s no longer the case.
But I think I’m over Toy Story. Let’s face it, there’s exactly three stories you can get out of this concept—toys lose their owners; toys are no longer wanted; toys confront an existential crisis—and after four movies, Pixar has explored them all. Everything on the screen provoked a reaction of “yep, seen that before.” It’s well-animated and as sharp and funny as ever, but it’s all getting a bit too comfy at this point.
There’s only one truly original idea: the fork. Woody’s new owner Bonnie makes a weird misshapen figure out of a plastic fork, a popsicle stick, and a pipecleaner, writes her name on its feet, and it comes to life. Which pokes at a neat idea: what makes a toy a toy? Woody and Buzz are expensive branded products, but really, all that separates a “toy” from anything else is a child’s belief. Forky is made of random junk, but Bonnie has decided that he will be a toy. However, the resulting character makes no sense: changing from a near-silent lobotomy victim to wisecracking comic relief as the movie progresses. (There’s a sequence where Forky, believing himself to be trash, keeps trying to throw himself away. Randy Newman, tasked with writing music for this, screwed up his brow in concentration, came up with a song called “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” and then patted himself on the back for a hard day’s work.) Sadly, Forky ends up becoming yet more clutter in a movie that’s already overstuffed with characters, most of whom wrapped up their arcs several movies ago and have no reason to be there.
Buzz is the prime example. It’s honestly funny how the writers have zero idea of what to do with him and basically write him out of the movie. I mean, his arc is resolved. His whole deal in Toy Story (1995) was that he was delusional and actually thought he was a space ranger. He is no longer delusional, no longer thinks he’s a space ranger, so what are we doing here? Buzz Lightyear is a character past his sell-by date, the equivalent of when you tell a funny story to someone, and instead of laughing they ask “…and then what happened?”
There’s also the issue of what’s not in the movie: a compelling villain.
Sid was great in the first movie, and I have a soft spot for Al McWhiggin. By contrast, Gabby Gabby doesn’t do the business. There’s an idea there (soft-spoken madness), but they don’t push it as far as they need to. The dial’s stuck on 2. They end up giving her a cloying, overly sympathetic backstory (to the point where she basically is forced to become a good guy), leading to the most obnoxious and unearned heel-face turn since Cletus “Gator Molester” Shithat betrayed his best friend Billie-Bob Grunklefuck in the Floribama Swamp-Ass Grand Wrasslin’ Championship of 1993 (classic match, I’m sure you remember it) and becoming a good character. If the first Toy Story had been written this way, we’d get a 20 minute flashback showing how Sid is secretly a nice child who gets yelled at by his dad. Can this studio grow some balls and write a proper villain again? The glory days of Hopper and Syndrome seem far behind us.
Toy Story 4 is not a bad movie. It is a deeply pointless one, however, which may be worse—I love many bad movies, but cannot love a waste of time. I’ve long felt that Pixar is a rat in a Skinner box that pressed a button a few times, received massive amounts of food, and now they’re just senselessly hammering that button forever, regardless of whether food is coming out.
Now they’re making a Toy Story 5. Okay. I have some creative story ideas they could use:
Woody gets washed out into the Pacific Garbage Patch. Alone and isolated, he goes mad under the hot alien sun, worshipping a god sculpted from plastic drinking straws. At night, he dreams of high-density polyethylene pellets melting and sliding down the stark walls of the sky, like the pale sperm of some celestial progenitor. He starts laughing dementedly, realizing that nature is a powerless fraud, and the world is controlled by the forces of manufacture and industry. In the final scene, he dives suicidally into the ocean, deliberately choking an endangered dolphin with his body while praying to return to the necrotic plastic heart that beats at the planet’s core.
Woody’s voice-box begins to break. When he pulls the string, the words slur and distort. There’s a sneak in my boot! Someone poisoned the warble-hole! The speech swiftly becomes incomprehensible, melting into a garbled wreckage of sounds, but sometimes, almost-audible messages can be heard, as though something with a thousand tongues is trying to communicate through him. One day, his voice box crackles to life on its own. “Don’t look for it in the garden.” What could this mean? When the toys explore the garden, Hamm finds a single tiny black flower growing beneath a canopy of wisteria and bougainvillea . The toys uproot the flower and dig a hole straight down: two feet under, there is a small, unmarked wooden box with a lock on it. They take the box inside, and Slinky Dog, working alone for several days straight, manages to pick the lock. “What did you see in the box?” Woody asks. “Nothing,” Slinky Dog says, glancing nervously at the ground. “The box was empty.” Immediately, he runs out of the house and out onto the road, where a car smashes him to pieces. The horrified survivors take no more chances with the box. They slam it shut (taking care not to look inside), re-lock it, carry it back to the garden, and bury it again. They promise each other that they’ll forget the incident. But one day, Woody pulls his voice-box string, and hears a distorted recording of Slinky Dog…
A weird change overcomes the toys. They fall into bestial rages. They are consumed by a hunger that only warm, living flesh can satisfy. Jessie is shown eating a dead bird with her teeth. Mr Potato Head’s hollow shell starts filling up with bloody mouse bones. They start communicating through glottal grunts and roars. Only Rex is unaffected. Researching the problem, he realizes that all of the toys are made of plastic, which is made of petrochemicals, which come from petroleum, which comes from ancient decayed biomass that includes dinosaurs. Essentially, the toys are now possessed by the souls of dead dinosaurs, and Rex is immune because he’s already a dinosaur. He doesn’t know what to do, and lifts up his arms in comical horror as the dinosaur-possessed toys assemble around him—blood dripping from their plastic mouths and hands—and kneel, awaiting his command.
Bonnie grows to adulthood. Puberty runs her down like an 18-wheeler truck. Confused and impressionable, she makes some friends online, and them some other friends. They introduce her to right and wrong. She cuts her hair, and dyes the remnants in variegated colors. She manufactures an edgy online persona, given to ranty, sweary, pop-feminist dialectic. By age 17, her Twitter pfp shows her with one eyebrow quirkily raised, sipping from a mug with “MALE TEARS” on it. But smugness gives way to guilt. She is a white-presenting person living in the wealthiest nation on Earth, and she feels absolutely horrible about. She was born in sin. Her parents were manspreaders, whitesplainers, and possibly even misgenderers. She seeks to escape who she is. She changes pronouns six times. Her mastectomy is booked for July. Maybe if she destroys the guilty girl, piece by piece, she’ll escape the sense that she’s evil and corrupt. She remains fond of her childhood toys, but realizes that she cannot go on owning Woody—he’s modeled after a Wild West sheriff, and 👏 we! 👏 don’t! 👏 do! 👏 that! 👏 anymore! The final straw comes when she watches the Woody’s Roundup puppet show. Not once does Woody acknowledge that he’s living on Chiricahua Apache land! Horrified, she burns Woody on an open fire, hoping to purge her sins. Woody screams as his face melts. He screams and screams.
A new toy joins the gang: Murdilator the Deathslayer. He’s pretty cool, particularly his brain-vivisector attachment. But beneath the MADE IN CHINA sticker on his foot there’s a compartment, and inside the compartment, Buzz finds a rolled up scrap of paper. It’s a handwritten Mandarin message. 救命啊！我被困在玩具厂里了！“HELP! I AM TRAPPED IN A TOY FACTORY!” Murdilator consents to have his brain-vivisector attachment damaged on purpose, so that Bonnie’s mom will return him to the story, which will then ship him back to China. The toys sneak into the return-parcel, and one week later, they’re being unpacked at a factory at Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. They want to find the imprisoned man and save him, but they’re in for a shock: all the workers at the factory are that man! They have arrived at a dismal Dickensian sweatshop. Thousands of dead-eyed contract workers sit in rows, performing Q&A inspections of worthless plastic dreck for brutal hours and starvation wages. Even death is not an escape. The factory doors are locked, and anti-suicide nets are strung under every window. An overseer walks up and down the benches like a slave-driver at a galley, and snatches up the damaged Murdilator from the packaging. With vindictive swiftness, he identifies the worker who signed off on this particular toy, and docks him a week’s salary. The man starts weeping. He has a family. The toys are left heartsick by what they’ve done: they haven’t helped the man, they’ve made his lot in life even worse! The rest of the movie is Murdilator the Deathslayer sitting on a therapist’s chair with Hamm, trying to overcome his guilt. Eventually, he has a breakthrough. He leaps into the air and cheers, and we end on a blissful reprise of “You Got A Friend in Me”.
Bo Peep is sold to a new owner. Unfortunately he’s an anime fan. The camera’s focus tightens around her terrified face, like an ensnaring net. From somewhere out of frame, we hear heavy breathing, and the sound of pants unzipping. The camera goes mercifully black.
A crossover, where Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber explain Christianity to the gang. Who’s mightier, God or the Boogie-Man? Does the Bible really tell us to forgive our enemies?
Really, they should probably just not make the movie at all. Enough’s enough.
When Trump was elected, a sentiment I heard was “man, political satirists are gonna have a field day!”
They did not have a field day. The overwhelming consensus (both among mortals on earth and devils in hell) is that Trump-based comedy sucked: it was more boring than a male pig digging a tunnel to South Africa and hackier than Angelina Jolie and Keanu Reeves typing on the same keyboard.
There were exceptions. Tim Heidecker portrays a thin-skinned, blustering Trump pastiche in On Cinema At the Cinema. He is sometimes funny.
But overall, Trump comedy falls into two camps: jokeless “can you believe he said/did that?!?!” reactions, or juvenile “Drumpf is an ugly orange peepee poopoo cheeto Hitler fartbaby” insults that seemed more designed to hurt Trump’s feelings than to elicit on a sapient lifeform’s face the ghost of a smile.
Steve Benson, The Republic
Trump-era comedy had a horrendous heat-to-light ratio. There is only so much mileage to be had in Alec Baldwin pursing his lips and saying “yuge”.
What went wrong?
Trump was already a comedy character
The greatest comedian of the Trump years was Trump himself.
The man is hilarious. He has a diabolic gift for finding the most inappropriate thing possible to say, and then saying it. Calling Apple’s CEO “Tim Apple”. Talking about an African country called “Nambia”. Saying “Belgium is a beautiful city.” His “eulogy” for Colin Powell reads like literal satire, particularly the halfhearted backpedal at the end. “He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!”
This overt jokiness presented a problem for comedians, because it gave them little to work with. The favorite mode of satire is to take something serious, and twist it so that it’s ridiculous. It is difficult to parody a thing that’s already funny.
I’m not even saying “Trump’s too ridiculous to parody, folks!” I’m saying he conducted himself in a broad, facially absurd way that was possibly intentional. He became famous to younger generations as a media star, after all, and surely knows how to play that game.
The cleverest thing Trump ever did was brand himself as a clown. If you’re a clown, people tend to ignore factual errors, inattentiveness, etc. You are judged by a different standard than the rest of humanity. No scandal ever sticks to you. Your gaffes make people laugh. While your opponents get dragged down by seriousness, you can skate through. Eventually, people stop caring about the clownshow. It becomes “oh, he’s just doing that thing he’s always doing.” But the question is: will people elect a clown as President? Apparently (for a brief moment in 2016, at least) the answer was yes!
Once, I was convinced by Scott Adams “Clown Genius” hypothesis: that Trump was knowingly weaponizing absurdity to judo his enemies into submission. Now, I think he mainly got lucky. He was born the way he is, and about ten fortunate things coincided (a timely scandal for Clinton, and so forth) that allowed him to become the President. He was a beneficiary of circumstance who humped the White House door until his dick picked the lock.
Regardless, lots of other people are trying to become tactical clowns. I remember seeing this Dan Crenshaw campaign ad, which turns him into an action hero who jumps out of a plane, does a Marvel landing on the hood of an antifa car, and punches through the windshield. I never saw stuff this cartoony before in US politics, at least not from major candidates. Trump paved the way.
Nobody wanted to laugh at Trump. They wanted to cheer or boo.
One of the better political parodies I’ve seen is Key & Peele on Obama. The bit I linked basically suggests that Obama’s famed “relatability” was cynical, calculating act from a cynical, calculating politician. But here’s the important thing: this is not anti-Obama. It’s basically just exploring a side to his character.
You could never do a bit that subtle about Trump. Firstly, he is not a person who has those kinds of hidden depths. And even if he did, nobody wants to explore them.
In 2016, the US was heavily polarized. The kind of “let’s just laugh at politics” bipartisanship of Yes Minister was no longer possible. Today, you have to take a side. In the media, usually a liberal side. Yes We Can, Minister.
I was talking about this to my friend, fellow comedian Nikki Glaser, and we both agreed that in many ways, we’re too angry and scared to find the funny in Donald Trump’s rule. For me, dark material has to incubate for a really long time before it can make its way to the stage. (To give you an idea, it took me a decade to be able to find a way to write jokes about my mom’s death.) Comedians are now struggling to get the distance needed to make something awful hilarious.
And it’s not just raw outrage aimed at politicians – many of us are dealing with the emotional fallout of the 2016 election in our personal lives. We’re grappling with family members, co-workers and friends who voted for the other side. Everyone is very angry at each other. Nikki summed it up well when she said: “I hate doing Trump jokes because if a section of the audience doesn’t laugh, then I know they voted for him and then I have to spend the rest of the show hating part of my audience.” It’s a two-way street. Not even the comedians can avoid succumbing to The Great American Butthole Tightening.
For these people, comedy had become tangled up in morality and politics possibly to an unhealthy degree.
This jibes with societal shifts I noticed in the late Cracked era. Nobody, nobody gave a rat’s bum about jokes. I remember the imprecations, which usually started with preachy assertions of what comedy is or isn’t. Comedy doesn’t punch down. Comedy comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Comedy has always been political!
It’s all well and good to try and use comedy for socially productive purposes. But…well…have you ever seen one of those Evangelicals who help the poor and needy, but underneath it is their real goal, saving souls for Christ? Yeah, it always comes out in the end. Most comedians, circa 2016, were like that. Yes, they told jokes and made audiences laugh (or at least clap)…but that was incidental. Their real purpose was to change the world.
There was a strain of thought among the left that it was almost morally wrong to joke in the age of Trump. “We should be fighting and raging and mourning, not laughing!” Others took the view that joking about Trump could be done, but it was like joking about rape: something to be done very carefully and respectfully.
Steve Almond, writing for WBUR, castigated Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, not for being unfunny, but for being calm. He wanted to see rage and fury. He asserted that the ability to make jokes at all about the incoming administration was a luxury not all Americans could afford.
“The political fate of this country isn’t a joke — especially for our most vulnerable citizens” (…) “the difference between a Biden and Trump presidency is a direct threat to your life, not a punchline” (…) “[believing otherwise is] what the voice of privilege sounds like”.
If you find Trump funny, you are a privileged white person.
Olivia Cathcart states this case even more strongly in Trump Isn’t Funny.
If tragedy plus time equals comedy, then it’s going to be a long time before any Trump jokes can pack a punch again. Trump is a tragedy but one we haven’t had any space from yet. The storm still rages and a new wound opens every day. Desperately trying to wring comedy from such an evil man is like trying to tell knock knock jokes while the Titanic’s going down. I have no interest or patience for your “zany” sketch while mid-drowning in frozen waters, and I cringe just thinking about the first way-too-soon Vice-esque movie we’ll get about this.
Nothing about Trump is funny. Nothing about him can be funny. Stop trying to force it.
Earlier, she says:
I’m so tired. I’m so exhausted. Each bombshell feels more like a fallen acorn. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it doesn’t seem to work as a weapon against him, neither as fact nor fodder for jokes.
She reveals that she thinks of jokes as weapons. Their point is not to make anyone laugh, but to inflict damage on Trump, a person she hates. And if they are not doing that, she has little use for them.
I have not discussed “conservative comedy”, but here’s a flawed but interesting video on where they were at as of 2016. They had fallen prey to many of the same ailments of the left. They were too angry to be funny. Or too something to be funny.
There was simply no room for equivocation where Trump was concerned. You were with him or against him.
Trump is confusing and complicated
As Sam Kriss once noted, Trump makes little sense. He is like a fictional character created by a bad writer.
He’s a man’s man who refuses to drink beer and eats pizza with a knife and fork. He’s the voice of Rust Belt America while being a New York liberal with a gold toilet. He’s fanatically obsessed with his appearance, yet thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to look like…that. He’s a classless boor who’s also a germaphobe. He thinks handshakes are “barbaric” and gets angry when someone dips the same nacho into guacamole twice. He’s the first President to like soccer instead of football.
His qualities are strong, but you cannot assign a one-note character to them, like you can for Nixon (“crook”), Clinton (“sex pervert”), or Bush (“dumb redneck”). It’s hard to “nail” Trump with a comedic portrayal, much as it’s hard to nail an octopus to a wall. He doesn’t appear to have an inner life that can be pulled apart. He exists as a series of flamboyant poses and gestures, many of them contradictory.
Political views? Bad news, he doesn’t have any! He’s essentially a man who likes being on TV, likes being popular, and who likes having people chant his name and applaud when he speaks. He wants to save America, not out of principle, but so that he’ll be the one to save it.
He does have strong viewpoints, but they never come from a coherent ideology. As far as I can tell, he sees a social issue on TV, gets an idea on how to solve it stuck in his head, and gets so excited he won’t metaphorically change the channel for years or sometimes decades.
Yes, he got sucked into the Republican Party applause-circle, and has learned to mimic their speech patterns. But he’s fundamentally not one of them, as displayed by the fact that he often forgets the script and says what he really thinks.
He is curiously stuck in the past. I don’t mean he’s conservative. In many ways, he’s not. His biggest interests were:
the war on drugs
inner-city crime
reviving US industry, particularly coal and steel
winning trade wars against China
These were all talking points from the 80s and 90s.
I’m not saying Trump’s concerns aren’t important. But he campaigned on them to the detriment of more timely issues. He had to be prodded hard before he reacted appropriately to, say, COVID, or the opioid crisis. Imagine a left-aligned politician who’s obsessed with overpopulation, holes in the ozone layer, and saving pandas. Yet he dived into social media addiction with mind-numbing force.
None of it really adds up to a character.
It’s hard to insult Trump without “punching down”
Given that Trump’s character is a maze of contradictions, what’s left? His physical aspect. But what can you say about that?
That he’s fat? That’s sizeist. That he’s old? That’s gerontophobic. That he has small feminine hands? Homophobic. That Melania is a trophy wife? Misogynistic and xenophobic.
Additionally, Trump’s tastes…
Pro wrestling
Junk food
Action movies
Daytime TV
Conspicuous spending
…Are decidedly low-class. They sound like they belong to either trailer trash or a rich black rapper. The only “high-class” activity he conspicuously engages in is golf. And making fun of golf is the only thing hackier than making fun of Trump.
Trump Fatigue
I was tired of hearing about Trump. You were tired of hearing about Trump. We were all tired of hearing about Trump. The way he seemingly seemed to insert himself into every conversation is something I remember with a shudder.
There was nothing to say about him. Nobody understood him. It was just “Trump, huh?” for four long years.
Overfamiliarity is the enemy of every comic.
Because of the extended phenotype
This is a little awkward to explain, but makes perfect sense when you think about it.
Basically, our bodies are larger—much, much larger—than we give them credit for. Richard Dawkins writes about “extended phenotypes”—the idea is that although our genes solely encode proteins via DNA bases, they do more: by modulating our behavior, they allow us alter environments in ways that benefit our (meaning their; meaning the genes) survival. From a genetic perspective, there is little difference between a beaver’s fur (a dead covering over the beaver that has undergone a form of cell death called cornification), and a beaver’s dam (a pile of gnawed sticks and logs). Both have (or neither) could be considered part of the beaver’s body. In essence, there is no real place where the beaver’s body begins or ends. Where does the life begin under our skin? We are surrounded by a tight-knit halo of death: a nebula of flaking skin and hairs dying according to a keratinocyte differentiation programme. We are humans who have modified the world to suit us. So according to the extended phenotype theory, the entire world—and shortly the universe beyond it—is also part of our bodies. My lawn needed a shave. So did my beard. I found the two concepts becoming entwined in my mind. As I started mowing the lawn, I felt bitter eruptions of pain all across my skin, like fireballs stinging me. I looked down and saw hair falling from my body as I pushed the lawnmower. Next, I started pulling up weeds. Blood began gushing from the earth, then I realized it wasn’t coming from the earth, but from my own body.
This is the reason why Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) was bad for comedy.
