Can you imagine if the US elected a comedian? Voters would see right through the obvious ruse of some minor celebrity campaigning on being an outsider

Guatemala has elected a comedian as president. The US would never do that

Here in the United States we take our presidential elections seriously, throwing our support behind candidates with thoughtful, specific views and real experience, so it’s hard to understand how the Guatemalan people have elected self-styled political outsider and former standup comedian Jimmy Morales as their new president.



I mean, can you imagine having a comedian as president? Imagine watching the inauguration and wondering if the incoming president’s smile is actually masking some kind of Richard Pryor-esque demons, or a State of the Union address that goes overlong by an hour as the leader of the free world pads out his remarks hunting for the perfect call-back closing line, or living with the constant fear that the commander in chief of America’s armed forces might be convinced to hand over the nuclear codes in exchange for a meeting with Saturday Night Live tsar Lorne Michaels?

Comedians are notoriously nepotistic, too, so imagine if this hypothetical president packed cabinet positions with his or her cronies. We would have secretary of agriculture Tommy Chong pressuring farmers in Illinois to replace fields of corn with marijuana, secretary of education Louis CK tearing the system down until American children graduate high school with no knowledge of history or math but an expert understanding of Avid editing software and classic jazz music.

Picture this: secretary of heath and human services Joe Rogan advocating DMT and a swift kick in the spine as a treatment for the common cold while Marc Maron, newly appointed secretary of state, chomps nicotine lozenges with Vladimir Putin and closes every state dinner by asking: “We good?”

Let’s not even get into the mess we would be in if Amy Schumer somehow came to political power. It’s already hard enough saying you don’t think she’s that funny without being labeled a misogynist; imagine if she had the legal authority to authorize a drone strike.

No, a candidate like Morales could never gain traction here in the United States. Voters here would see right through the obvious ruse of some minor celebrity launching a campaign built around their status as an outsider ferociously opposed to the status quo.

Well, OK. OK. I forgot about Donald Trump. But voters in the United States would never go for someone with Morales’s richly documented history of racist remarks and disdain for the poor, never in a million years.

Well, maybe scratch that, too. But how about this: if you do some research on Jimmy Morales, his connections to party figures linked to military death squads comes up kind of frequently. Would anyone in the US go for a candidate with links to death squads?

Wait, let me go check the latest headline about Ben Carson’s candidacy.

He’s just hinting at a plan to censor “speech of extreme political bias” on college campuses, recalling how he “would go after people with hammers” as a teenager, and pledging to overturn the right to abortion. Phew.