How Donald Trump made political comedy grate again
Remember election night in 2016? CBS’ late-night host Stephen Colbert, visibly shocked on his live Showtime special by Donald Trump’s mounting victory, declared somberly, “I’m not sure it’s a comedy show anymore.”
He wasn’t alone. Across the entertainment world, many wondered whether the election of Trump would mean the death of political humor, much like other sober observers feared the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks would mean “the end of irony.”
Irony survived, and Colbert — among other comedians — has thrived, as Trump might say, bigly.
Trump takedowns have helped “The Late Show” soar more than 20 percent to reach No. 1 in the first quarter of this year with 4.02 million viewers in Nielsen’s late-night ratings, passing NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” (2.76 million) and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (2.35 million).
Remember Kathy Griffin? A year ago her career looked doomed after a graphic photo of her holding a fake decapitated head of President Trump sparked national outrage. A year later, tickets for her comeback tour sold briskly, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and she was honored earlier this month as “Comedian of the Year” at the first Palm Springs International Comedy Festival gala.
Yet some see a downside to this robust injection of politics into mainstream comedy. It can be summed up in one word that has been attributed to such celebrity humorists as Seth Meyers and Tina Fey: “Clapter.”
“Clapter,” professional comics say, is the sound made by an audience that is clapping — perhaps with a
“Whoop!” or two for emphasis — instead of laughing at a joke. That’s often because the joke isn’t all that funny but makes a compelling political or social point. People clap as a sign of their support more than their amusement.
The word was brought up by Sara Schaefer, an awardwinning writer for Fallon’s program, as she argued for the proposition “Trump is Bad for Comedy” on the most recent “Intelligence Squared,” an hourlong debate program on public radio stations and its own website and podcast.
“It’s very tempting,” she pointed out, to play for applause instead of just laughs, but it’s a cop-out from the comedian’s central purpose, which is to be funny.
“I’ve seen many of my fellow comedians fall ill to this scourge,” she said. “Everything is now divided, and it’s very tense, and it’s actually pretty painful. So, when they come to a club, and I tell a joke about Trump, the people that laugh are on one side, and the people that don’t laugh are on the other, and now people are scared that a civil war is literally going to break out in the club. That’s not a good condition for comedy.” Throughout the debate, which also featured conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke on Schaefer’s side and NPR’s “Studio 360” host Kurt Andersen and HBO’s “Veep” executive producer Billy Kimball against, the subject of Trumpera political polarization kept coming up, along with the question of whether comedy was adding to it.
“I would argue that while the humor to be had out of the Clinton administration, and there was plenty of it, was fairly, you know, concentrated in its subject — Monica Lewinsky — but it kind of reached out to everybody, including Clinton supporters,” said O’Rourke, a Republican who admitted voting for Hillary Clinton. “And in that respect, it was not nearly as divisive, and there was also good comedy in the sense that it showed us what we had in common.”
Indeed, the polarization of comedy reflects the polarization of our electorate. That’s sad, yet the division seems to me inevitable at a time when, as Fox News and Colbert demonstrate, audiences are being sliced into narrower segments that can bring profits to an enterprise that narrows its appeal to its base, liberal or conservative, as Trump has.
Unfortunately, audience members who don’t get the joke can feel offended if a comic seems not just to be mocking Trump but mocking them. Witness the ferocious backlash when Trump supporters thought Clinton was calling all of them “deplorables,” not just the extremists as she intended.
Perhaps the loss by Republicans of the House of Representatives in the midterms will calm some of the tensions, at least among those of us who fear for the future of democracy. So far, our institutions are holding together, and that’s no joke.
But Trump also plays a role. He weaponized comedy through effective mockery of his opponents “Crooked Hillary,” “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Low-energy Jeb” Bush and others. At this rate, our upcoming presidential race could sound like an insult battle between rap artists unless voters and serious leadership drive out the “clapter.” I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
Audience members who don’t get the joke can feel offended if a comic seems not just to be mocking Trump but mocking them.