Whatever else you might want to say about the first weeks of the Trump era, one fact is undeniable: we are living in the golden age of hand-lettered signs. History will judge how effective the Women’s March and the airport protests of last week turn out to be, but as protest movements go, I suspect they were unrivalled in terms of genuinely clever one-liners.

The signs were everywhere – on Instagram and Twitter and email – cardboard memes designed both for the crowd they were immersed in, and the great teeming after-party of social media. Some were gleefully profane: “This pussy grabs back!”; “now you’ve pissed off grandma”. Some were meta, like the many variations of the “Not normally a sign guy, but geez” placard that first appeared in the weeks after the election. Some found comedic defiance in rewriting the canon of resistance, like the sign that appeared at JFK the night after Trump signed the immigration executive order: “First they came for the Muslims, and I said NOT THIS TIME FASCISTS!”

I suspect one of these days a Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee will run for national office

The signs were only part of a larger story. American liberty, tolerance and the separation of powers may be under fire, but so far, against all odds, laughter is thriving in the Age of Trump. Fittingly for a presidential campaign that, by many accounts, first emerged out of Barack Obama’s roasting of Trump at the White House correspondents’ dinner, comedy has woven a bright and defining thread through the events of the past six months. Make no mistake, these are dark times for the Republic. But they have also been uncommonly funny.

I find the persistence of laughter to be heartening, as incongruous as it might seem. Incongruity is one of the fundamental forces in the universe of comedy: take two things that don’t usually belong together; throw them into the same sentence; hilarity ensues. Dark comedy in particular thrives in juxtaposing the solemn, the mortal, with the petty and the prurient. So it makes sense that we should find ourselves reaching for punchlines when we want to throw punches. When things are bleak, we lean on humor to fight back, to build bonds, to whittle away at the pedestals of the powerful.

Humor is no substitute for engaged journalism: we still need White House reporters eliciting leaks from within Trump’s inner circle, and Jake Tapper calling out Kellyanne Conway’s lies on CNN. But the jokes have played a defining role in framing the Trump administration, establishing the defining tropes. The master-narrative that seems to be emerging that Trump and his emissaries have an Orwellian relationship to the truth came from the #alternativefacts memes circulating through social media: fake transcripts of Sean Spicer saying preposterous things followed by “Period”; mock remembrances of Conway’s fictitious Bowling Green Massacre.

Laughter turns out to be central to the resistance for another reason: the unique cocktail of authoritarian bellicosity and emotional neediness that is Donald Trump. Presidents and presidential candidates have been skewered on Saturday Night Live since Chevy Chase’s bumbling Gerald Ford impression in season one, more than 40 years ago. (Asked a challenging economics question during a debate parody, Chase’s Ford replied, “I’m sorry, but I was told there would be no math on the exam.”) But most politicians easily shrugged off those impersonations, or happily played along with the gag.

Trump, on the other hand, clearly finds Alec Baldwin’s take on him to be infuriating; a number of sources confirm that Melissa McCarthy’s savage impression of Sean Spicer has seriously damaged the press secretary in the eyes of his boss. The autocrat can be feared or despised and still maintain his power. But he cannot be ridiculous.

The prominence of satire in the age of Trump is surely also a product of the sheer number of satirists now at work. When George W Bush took office in 2001, social media as we know it did not exist, and only two television shows were serving up political humor on a regular basis: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which had just gone on the air a few years earlier, and Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. Stewart is – tragically – sitting this one out, but he has been replaced by late-night hosts whose material is fixated on mocking Trump at every opportunity: Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Seth Meyers and Maher himself.

That deep bench of political comedy may well end up having a more direct impact on politics. In the weeks after Trump’s election, several commentators suggested that the Democrats should seriously consider running their own celebrity for president. (Traditionally, this is a Republican tactic, from Ronald Reagan to Schwarzenegger’s California governorship, to Trump himself.) But even more potent than a mere celebrity would be a celebrity comedian. I suspect one of these days a Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee will run for national office and prove to be incredibly effective candidates. They will have the celebrity allure of Trump or Reagan, but they will actually be able to think on their feet in the way that a great comedian can, particularly one trained in improv. They will be devastating on the stump and in a debate, and they’ll get votes of that crucial subset of the American electorate that votes purely along celebrity recognition lines.



Is it possible that the joke is on us? Gallows humor doesn’t always save you from the gallows, after all. Writing for the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum observed the way Trump himself ran his campaign events like a Vegas insult comic. “His rallies boiled with rage and laughter, which were hard to tell apart,” she wrote. “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 … 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 … where [Trump] still seemed to live.”

Nussbaum is certainly correct in her portrait of Trump’s “braggadocious” humor (a favorite non-word of the president’s), and she’s right to find something menacing in that posture. In all the sci-fi imaginings of our dystopian futures, no one anticipated a world where Triumph the Insult Comic Dog wins the presidency and promptly sets up an authoritarian regime.

But I suspect that comedy will turn out to be on the side of the angels. Partly this is the nature of jokes themselves. The list of authoritarian comics is a short one. Humor generally comes from the underdogs and outsiders; satire works when you are mocking the powerful; when you yourself have the power, you’re just a bully. (Case in point: Trump’s notorious imitation of disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.)

So far, the feedback loop between public mockery and White House reaction is already so tight that Trump opponents have, in recent days, been actively soliciting satire that portrays Trump as the hapless puppet of Steven Bannon, in a deliberate effort to turn Trump against his white nationalist adviser. We are learning, in these early days, that jokes and memes have a role to play not unlike the protest gathering themselves: a way of building solidarity, focusing the general public on the abuses of the administration, applying pressure where the White House is most vulnerable. Not to mention that other intangible benefit of humor in dark times: keeping each other sane.

Years ago, the late media scholar Neil Postman wrote a prophetic book about the escapism of the television age called Amusing Ourselves To Death. A bleak future America where a reality TV show personality is elected president would have seemed entirely plausible to Postman. But I suspect he would have been surprised by the nascent power of humor as a form of resistance, the strange new channel that opens up when you combine the scrawled satire of the cardboard signs and the digital 140 characters of Twitter. Facing a regime so vulnerable to satire, and living in age where a well-turned joke can reach millions, the American left may well find itself reversing Postman’s formula, and amusing itself back to life.

Wonderland: How play made the modern world is out on 16 February



