Is a politician’s appearance fair game for late-night hosts?
IS GOING AFTER A POLITICIAN’S APPEARANCE A GOOD LOOK?
When Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz dropped out of the 2016 U.S. Republican primary, Samantha Bee mourned. In early May of that year, Bee paid tribute to the eminently mockable presidential hopeful on her late-night show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (which airs in Canada on The Comedy Network). Pulling out an oversized book labelled Cruz Thesaurus, Toronto-born Bee let ’em rip, calling the Texas senator a “revival-tent Gollum,” “tentacle monster,” “half-melted Reagan dummy” and “the junior senator from the uncanny valley,” to name a few.
In addition to his politics, Cruz’s face was a gold mine for Bee’s writing staff, and her audience roared whenever Bee dunked on him. She, and Cruz, are not alone: Criticizing political figures by poking fun at their personal appearance and physicality has been a mainstay of late-night comedy since Saturday Night Live opened its fourth-ever episode with Chevy Chase as a bumbling, stumbling Gerald Ford, then the U.S. president. These days, it’s not uncommon to see late-night hosts and comedians feign disgust at Steve Bannon’s complexion (Stephen Colbert), refer to Jeff Sessions as an elf (Saturday Night Live) or point out the resemblance between Mitch Mcconnell and an intimate part of a female chicken’s anatomy (Trevor Noah).
Over the past decade, comedy has faced a reckoning over the uneasy power dynamics and moral implications of such humour (e.g., the way late-night jokes about Monica Lewinsky’s appearance shaped her public persona). But there’s another layer to this issue: Donald Trump, today’s biggest political-comedy target, dished out one demeaning slur after another on his way to the Oval Office — such as disparaging his GOP primary opponent
Carly Fiorina at a 2015 rally (“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”) — and recently referred to New York Democrat Representative Jerrold Nadler as “Fat Jerry,” to name just a couple examples. When the U.S. president himself directly insults people’s looks in the gut-punch style of a standup comic, do late-night shows have licence to do the same? And, perhaps most important: Are jokes of this kind even funny?
Elliott Kalan, a former head writer for The Daily Show under Jon Stewart, says the ideal joke is more substantive. “It’s rare that the situation ever comes up where it’s like, this is all good stuff about this person’s policies, but let’s dig deep and see if we can come up with a joke about their appearance,” he says. For the two-time Emmy winner, making fun of a person’s looks isn’t exactly off the table, but it shouldn’t become a crutch for writers of political comedy. “Certainly there was a point when it was very easy to come up with Chris Christie weight jokes. And we had to say, ‘We’re not doing those.’”
The tradition of skewering the appearance of public figures goes back to 1360 BC, when an artist drew an unflattering caricature of King Tut’s father-in-law. Political cartoonists have been doing it for centuries, using aspects of politicians’ looks as metaphors for their personalities or policies.
There’s an echo of these early attacks in contemporary late-night comedy. Jeffrey P. Jones, a professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia and the executive director of the Peabody Awards, says TV shows didn’t ridicule the appearance of U.S. presidents until Chase’s infamous Ford sketches on SNL. As TV turned campaigning into a kind of reality show, the physical attributes of political figures were increasingly offered up for scrutiny in unforgiving close-up for viewers.
Johnny Carson went after Ronald Reagan’s jet-black hair so often that Nancy Reagan asked him to stop. In a backhanded sort of way, he did, clarifying to his audience that Reagan doesn’t dye his hair — “he bleaches his face.” And it wasn’t just comedians who cracked about leaders’ looks: Gerald Ford took aim not only at Reagan’s hair but his deeply tanned skin when he said of his one-time GOP primary challenger, “He doesn’t dye his hair — he’s just prematurely orange.”
Kalan recalls a favourite target of The Daily Show, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. “He has a very Blanche Dubois way of talking, he has that Southern voice, and he uses it to feign outrage at things,” Kalan explains. “‘I do declare! I can’t believe it! Never have I ever seen!’ That I think is OK, because he’s using his voice as a political tool — he is pretending to be upset in a way that mirrors a character trope of Southern womanhood.” But, he adds, “There were times when our jokes would edge into, I think, implying he’s gay, and that’s not OK.”
(Representatives from the late-night shows Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, SNL and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon all declined to speak for this piece.)
These jokes go hand in hand with the way we view their targets. Studies show we quickly form judgments about people based on even the most fleeting impressions of the way they look and talk, and that affects the way we evaluate political candidates. Robert Lichter, the director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, an organization that tracks late-night political humour, says more late-night jokes about a politician — about both policies and personal traits — correlates with lower favorability ratings for that politician (though that doesn’t necessarily mean one causes the other).
In 1976, Chevy Chase told Time magazine, “Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest laugh is the physical joke.” Today, some writers feel the opposite — that Trump’s flaws mean comedy should avoid what’s easy.
Kalan has no patience for quips about Trump’s orange skin or weird hair, since “there’s so much about his soul” that’s open to critique.
“To talk about his appearance, it’s like, c’mon, what are we doing?” he says. “It’s one of those moments when you’re like, ‘Am I stooping to the same level as the president?’”