Since November 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes—dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity. Growing up a Jewish kid in the nineteen-seventies, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—that meant freedom for everyone.

But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur. Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual comedy, on both the right and the left—and every combination of the four was labelled “satire.” In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for President as payback for a comedy routine: Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?

Obama’s act—his public revenge for Trump’s birtherism—was a sophisticated small-club act. It was dry and urbane, performed in the cerebral persona that made Obama a natural fit when he made visits to, say, Marc Maron’s podcast or Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” In contrast, Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He was the insult comic, the stadium act, the ratings-obsessed headliner who shouted down hecklers. His rallies boiled with rage and laughter, which were hard to tell apart. You didn’t have to think that Trump himself was funny to see this effect: I found him repulsive, and yet I could hear those comedy rhythms everywhere, from the Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” routine to the gleeful insult-comic slams of Don Rickles (for “hockey puck,” substitute “Pocahontas”) to Andrew Dice Clay, whose lighten-up-it’s-a-joke, it’s-not-him-it’s-a-persona brand of misogyny dominated the late nineteen-eighties. The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.

Like that of any stadium comic, Trump’s brand was control. He was superficially loose, the wild man who might say anything, yet his off-the-cuff monologues were always being tweaked as he tested catchphrases (“Lock her up!”; “Build the wall!”) for crowd response. On TV and on Twitter, his jokes let him say the unspeakable and get away with it. “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening—I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” he told reporters in July, at the last press conference he gave before he was elected. Then he swept his fat palm back and forth, adding a kicker: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

It was a classically structured joke. There was a rumor at the time that Russia had hacked the D.N.C. At the same time, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from when she was Secretary of State—which were stored on a private server—were under scrutiny. Take two stories, then combine them: as any late-night writer knows, that’s the go-to algorithm when you’re on deadline. When asked about the remark, on Fox News, Trump said that he was being “sarcastic,” which didn’t make sense. His delivery was deadpan, maybe, but not precisely sarcastic.

But Trump went back and forth this way for months, a joker shrugging off prudes who didn’t get it. He claimed that his imitation of the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski was a slapstick take on the reporter “grovelling because he wrote a good story.” (“Grovelling,” like “sarcastic,” felt like the wrong word.) He did it when he said that Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever”—a joke, he insisted, and he actually meant her nose. “I like people who weren’t captured,” about John McCain: that had the shape of a joke, too.

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique: state false facts so outlandish that they must be true, because who would make up something so crazy? (“I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”) But a joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy. It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast. “Buh-leeve me, buh-leeve me!” Trump said in his act, again and again. Lying about telling the truth is part of the joke. Saying “This really happened!” creates trust, even if what the audience trusts you to do is to keep on tricking them, like a magician reassuring you that while his other jokes are tricks, this one is magic.

It could be surprisingly hard to look at the phenomenon of Trump directly; the words bent, the meaning dissolved. You needed a filter. Television was Trump’s natural medium. And television had stories that reflected Trump, or predicted his rise—warped lenses that made it easier to understand the change as it was happening.

No show has been more prescient about how far a joke can go than “South Park.” Its co-creators, the nimble libertarian tricksters Trey Parker and Matt Stone, could sense a tide of darkness that liberal comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee could not, because “South Park” liked to ride that wave, too. For two decades, “South Park,” an adult animated show about dirty-mouthed little boys at a Colorado school, had been the proud “anti-political-correctness” sitcom. Season 19, which came out in 2015, was a meta-meditation on P.C., and, by the season’s end, one of the characters, Mr. Garrison, was running for President on a platform of “fucking immigrants to death.” There was also a Canadian President who emerged as “this brash asshole who just spoke his mind,” the show explained. “He didn’t really offer any solutions—he just said outrageous things. We thought it was funny. Nobody really thought he’d ever be President. It was a joke! But we just let the joke go on for too long. He kept gaining momentum, and by the time we were all ready to say, ‘O.K., let’s get serious now—who should really be President?,’ he was already being sworn into office.”