Alphamale Trump’s attempts at humour miss the mark
‘‘To have a sense of humour, you need intelligence, generosity and the ability to pay attention.’’ Gina Barreca doesn’t believe Donald Trump fits the bill.
OCCUPYING the most powerful office in the world is clearly not enough to make a dull man interesting. Donald Trump is a dull man. Our president has no sense of humour. It’s probably easier and safer to be bored by him when he’s serious than to deal with him when he’s attempting to be playful. For example, sitting next to the French President at a state dinner in his honour, President Donald Trump was said to have yammered on and on about his polls, which I’ll bet was not terribly amusing for Emmanuel Macron.
But it was probably better than what Trump did the next day: wiping fake dandruff off the French president’s shoulder during a press conference. Trump was performing an act of dominance more obvious, though less debonair, than ones filmed for ape specials on Animal Planet. Trump attempted to disguise it as a playful moment. But he couldn’t pass it off as anything other than what it was: a pathetically misguided joke. Trump needs to demonstrate that he’s the only alphamale in the room.
Trump is feeling alpha enough, in fact, to be making increasing numbers of calls on his personal cellphone, bypassing the White House switchboard and security protocol.
The very idea of a Donald Trump phone call makes me cringe. Surely, it’s not only me: If you saw his name appear on your caller I.D., would you really want to pick up?
Isn’t he precisely one of those folks about whom you’d say, ‘‘It’s OK. I’ll call him back.’’
But the real reason you wouldn’t want to pick up the phone is because it’d be tedious to have a conversation with Trump.
You know why a lot of people wouldn’t want to pick up the phone if Trump were calling, sit next to Trump at a dinner or take him up on an offer to watch shark documentaries in Beverley Hills?
Donald Trump has no sense of humour. He’s worse than Steve Carell’s character Michael Scott on The Office. He is incapable of creating authentic humour.
To have a sense of humour, you need intelligence, generosity and the ability to pay attention. You need originality, awareness and a sharp sense of timing.
Trump is a type, one of those braggarts who grab waitresses because they think that’s hilarious. After all, they could give her money to make up for it. They get a few laughs and what else could she want? That humour depends on the humiliation of others.
I once thought Trump’s only hope of creating humour would be if he were selfdeprecating, but now I believe he’s lost even the low ability to do that. Trump, in fact, might not ever have had the humility to be able to pull that off.
In 2017, Matthew Liif wrote a letter to The Washington Post disagreeing with a piece about how Trump was using New York tactics to get his way in Washington. Liif argued that it was a ‘‘perverse misjudgment’’ of President Trump’s character to say that he ever used selfdeprecating humour. Liif offered this as an example: During a lunch with UN ambassadors, Trump ‘‘jokingly polled the room on whether they thought US Ambassador Nikki Haley, seated next to him, was doing a good job. ‘How do you all like Nikki?’ he asked. ‘Otherwise, she can easily be replaced.’ That’s deprecating, indeed,’’ wrote Liff, ‘‘But not selfdeprecating.’’
Former FBI director James Comey never saw Trump laugh, ‘‘Not in public, not in private.’’ The passage from Comey’s A Higher Loyalty about Trump’s ‘‘inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humour of others’’ is convincingly unnerving.
I agree with Comey that a leader who can’t laugh is sad and that a president who can’t laugh is scary — especially when that president is trying so hard to be impressively funny.
Trump’s sense of humour is like his combover: You can argue that it’s his alone, but that doesn’t mean it works. Nobody says about Trump, ‘‘What a terrific head of hair,’’ and nobody says, ‘‘What a great sense of humour.’’
❛ I agree with Comey that a leader who can’t laugh is sad and that a president who can’t laugh is scary — especially when that president is trying so hard to be impressively
funny.