Mark Chalifoux

Mark Chalifoux is a Cincinnati-based standup comedian who has told jokes on Fox and IFC and tours nationally. He’s hosting a comedy show at the Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine on Thursday as a fundraiser for the ACLU. For more information: www.whatajokefest.com/project/cincinnati/

As a professional standup comedian, I’ve stopped counting the number of times someone has said to me, “Oh, you must love Donald Trump winning the election. He must be great for comedy.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

For starters, there’s a considerable part of the population that is outright terrified by his presidency. They are scared to death about losing their health insurance or their reproductive rights. They worry about friends or family members being put on a registry or on a plane out of the country. Fear is not usually a fun starting point for comedy. Those people aren’t going to be in the right mindset to hear cleverly crafted jokes about how parenting toddlers can be taxing or that funny thing I saw the one time I went to the gym in 2016.

Then you have a smaller, but still considerable, portion of the country that seemingly revels in mocking those who are upset about Trump – calling them “precious snowflakes in need of “safe spaces.” Yet Trump's fans can move seamlessly from ridiculing safe spaces to unleashing a digital flash mob of vitriol the second the "safe space" being violated is a football field during the singing of the National Anthem.

The best comedy taps into truth, but no one can even agree on what’s true anymore. Independent fact-checkers have caught our president-elect telling half-truths and outright falsehoods at a rate that would impress even my 4-year-old daughter. The phenomenon of "fake news" is now more culturally relevant than bacon and kale combined. Facebook is drowning in it, whether it’s about the nefarious pizza parlors in D.C. or Donald Trump’s taste in Russian theater. Our president-elect uses the term as a scarlet letter for any news outlet that hurts his feelings while real fake news runs amok.

We live in a time when a rigorously reported, well-written news story isn’t nearly as impactful as any meme with a bald eagle in it. Almost a year ago, New York Magazine reported on a study that found some people trust internet comments on vaccines more than they believe scientists. Allow yourself a moment for the utter terror of that finding to sink in. Years of research and education don’t carry as much weight with some people as a guy who calls himself VanillaBear56 and thinks vaccines turn you into a duck. It’s a little bit tougher to bring an audience to the same destination – the same punchline – when the beginning is choose-your-own-reality.

Trump presents a similar problem for comedians as he does for news outlets: There’s too much to focus on. Our attention span rarely allows us to move past his tweets to anything of substance. Where to start when you have a president-elect who can feud with an actress in the morning, the pope at lunch and complain about TV ratings before dinner? His presidency is chum to the growing population of sharks in this country who exist only to be outraged online. But it’s going to be exhausting for everyone else.

Donald Trump is simply too easy to make fun of. He’s got skin thinner than the purest of snowflakes and presents too many obvious targets for people to get past. Few things sound more terrible than four straight years of hearing the same jokes about hair, orange skin, small hands and where you can grab women. Anyone with a keyboard will be beating that dead horse until long after it becomes a bag of bones.

After audiences have been force-fed bad scrambled eggs on a daily basis, they get queasy at just the sight of a comedian's soufflé.