Trump Weekly: Field Notes from the Comedy Monoculture

this week donald trump proposed renaming lake ontario to lake america last week you and i talked about the race between fact checkers and punchlines this week the punchlines are writing themselves and demanding health insurance as a writer you're supposed to be grateful for this stuff it's material right a gift but it's like being a chef and someone just backs up a cement truck full of mayonnaise to your kitchen door you have an infinite supply of one ingredient you'll never go hungry but you may also lose your mind and that's been the deal for years a study from a while back found that 97% of political jokes on colbert and fallon were about trump 97% it's

not a comedy slate that's a residency we created an entire comedic monoculture around one guy's creative decisions and the machine demands to be fed so he says lake america and the teleprompter just starts glowing it's pavlovian the problem is after a while the jokes aren't even jokes they're just pointing you just hold up the absurdity and say look and the audience that already agrees with you laughs the other half of the country changes the channel and it turns out they had somewhere to go here's where we've seen this before every action has an equal and opposite reaction for every stephen colbert there is a greg gutfeld while everyone was focused on the network guys gutfeld quietly became the highest rated host in late night on cable without the big movie star guests he just

built a show for the half of the country that was tired of being the punchline i mean it's a smart play a brutal cynical but smart play you corner the market on grievance but gutfeld is the obvious move he's the pattern the thing that really scrambled my brain this week is the other guy adam sandler yes that adam sandler he's apparently a serious republican political figure now advocating for tax cuts and veterans' rights one commentator david fromm called him a new archetype in gop outreach they get this quote credibility through credibility influence through empathy rather than confrontation sandler himself said they don't need to wear a suit to speak truth

woah this is not the guy who made a movie with a magical remote control this is different this is way more effective than another angry guy in a tie yelling at you from a news desk so what does it all add up to you have the mainstream comics who can't quit trump you have the direct right wing counter programming and now you have the friendly familiar face of your childhood telling you that maybe just maybe cutting the capital gains tax is a good idea great just great the whole thing reminds me of this concept from psychology the affective shift it's when a comedian suddenly stops being funny to get serious to tell you how grave the situation is think of colbert after january 6 the humor drops away and he looks you in the eye and tries to make sense of the chaos that's a high

stakes move it's using the trust you built with jokes to land a serious punch and that's the real difference here one side's affective shift is a desperate plea about the fate of democracy the other side's affective shift is adam sandler going from a goofy voice to a sincere pitch for a policy point the stakes are not the same the gravity is not the same one is playing for the soul of the country the other is playing for a key demographic in a swing state so this week wasn't just about a ridiculous name for a lake it was about the complete fracturing of the reality we all share and comedy is

just the first draft of that history the jokes aren't for everyone anymore they're passwords they tell you which side you're on and in this new world the most powerful political statement might not be a speech from a podium it might just be a joke that you don't find funny at all