On a Monday night in January, people looking to escape the gloom and chaos of Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office gathered at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory for Michael Che’s Secret Show. Tickets to the special comedy event, which benefitted Planned Parenthood, went on sale five days after the inauguration and four days after the Women’s March became one of the largest-scale protests in American history (also, three days after the birth of "alternative facts,” two days after the President pushed false voter fraud rumors, and one day after the first reports of his impending refugee ban). The show sold out in under an hour. As soon as Cipha Sounds, a New York City-based DJ and comedian, took the stage and started spinning, heads in the crowd were bobbing, expectant smiles on their faces. “Out of the five fingers on your hand, which one do you feel represents your feelings toward Donald Trump?” asked Cipha, cranking the volume on CeeLo’s “Fuck You.”

“It’s not about an agenda. It’s more about bringing you guys a fun fucking show,” Che said, welcoming the audience. He brought up a comedy Dream Team: Kevin Iso, Mike Birbiglia, Amy Schumer, Colin Quinn, Lena Dunham, Leslie Jones, John Mulaney, and Che’s partner on Saturday Night Live’s "Weekend Update," Colin Jost. But this was not a night for liberals to forget their woes. None of the performers could finish his or her set without referencing the political climate. They went dark; they looked for bitter laughs.

“Tomorrow, he’s going to pick a Supreme Court justice and it’s going to be like, literally, the fucking bad guy from Mad Max,” said Amy Schumer. “Since November you just find yourself Googling, ‘What do you do when someone who talks like a dictator takes over your country?’” said Mike Birbiglia. Lena Dunham told a story about Trump lewdly complimenting her friend when she was 12 (more on that later). In the same way Donald Trump had willed himself into the news cycle and then the White House, he had muscled his way into their acts, too.

“I’m sick of having to pay attention to all this shit,” John Mulaney told the crowd. “That will be the lasting grievance I have, is that I can’t zone out and stare at the wall, which is my greatest goddamn pleasure in life,” he said. “That is an American right that has been taken away.”

Josh Gondelman Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images Maz Jobrani CBS Photo Archive

Lena Dunham Rommel Demano/Getty Images Aparna Nancherla Theo Wargo/Getty Images

As the 45th president enters his fifth month in office, stand-up comedians continue to wrangle with the paradox that is President Donald Trump. He is an absurdist’s dream: a braggadocious, self-pitying billionaire with a Donald Duck temper; our nation’s punchline-in-chief. But Trump is not comedy gold. He’s pyrite, a one-note, worn-out punchline—even children have the impression down. Mocking him can feel redundant: What parody could be more outlandish than Trump himself? He already makes gruff boasts alongside bespectacled Easter bunnies, and tweets words that are not actually words. And yet, ignoring Trump would be flagrantly tone deaf. As comic Bill Dawes puts it: “It’s the orange elephant in the room.”

"There was a statue in the middle of New York City of Trump with the tiniest penis. Like, little-dick-Trump. We laughed at that shit. We took selfies with that shit. And now he’s president. Think about that. The kid we bullied has a gun now.” — Jerrod Carmichael

While the “How to cover Trump” quandary has plagued the media ever since his election, it’s caused at least as much consternation and doubt among stand-up comedians over the last six months, too. In a December Village Voice article titled “Comedians in the Age of Trump: Forget Your Stupid Toupee Jokes,” New York-based comic Aparna Nancherla urged her colleagues to question how they went about “our quasi-contractual obligation as comedians to roast the powerful.”

“The problem isn’t that he’s unmockable; it’s that he’s too dangerous to simply mock,” wrote Nancherla. “How do we laugh at this world when it’s run by a man who not only can’t take a joke, but would be giddy at the prospect of taking away our right to make them at all?”

Not to mention: how do you even goof on a man who is already as Looney Tunes as the Tasmanian Devil? Trump is a whirling dust cloud of antics—some goofy, some grave, some both.

“The cartoonishness pulls away from the gravity of those things,” says Guy Branum, a comic based in Los Angeles. “It makes us see it all as funny things a funny man was saying”—not the reckless behavior of a supremely powerful maniac.

In a world where the funny man who says funny things compliments murder-happy authoritarian leaders and declares the "dishonest media" an enemy of the people, ludicrous absurdities become horrifying possibilities. Jokes like this Josh Gondelman bit—“In 50 years, the documentaries are going to be off the hook. Netflix is going to be popping. Germany’s gonna get to do a Schindler’s List about us.”—were funnier before Trump signed an executive order that blocked visa holders from multiple majority-Muslim nations from seeing their families, and led TSA agents to reportedly detain a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother overnight.

“Right now, it feels hard to find a humorous angle before we know how some of this is going to pan out,” Nancherla says.

Jerrod Carmichael, star of NBC’s The Carmichael Show and the comedy world’s reigning contrarian, believes he knows how we got to this point.

“All we had to do was be kind of nice to Trump,” he told a crowd at Gotham Comedy Club in November, working out a joke he would later use in his latest HBO special, 8. “Think about our tweets, what you said to your friends and shit. There was a statue in the middle of New York City of Trump with the tiniest penis. Like, little-dick-Trump. We laughed at that shit. We took selfies with that shit. And now he’s president. Think about that. The kid we bullied has a gun now.”

Of course, the kid we bullied was always a bully himself, a man who mocked the disabled and bragged about sexually assaulting women. The real reason we got to this point, argues Mike Lawrence, a stand-up based in Los Angeles, is that we stooped to his level.

A chilling effect has already taken place at comedy clubs across the country. Comedians talk of employing a new calculus: Is this a pro-Trump crowd or an anti-Trump crowd? And if it’s the wrong one, will I bomb—or worse?

“The jokes about him [during the election were] bad—the tiny hands, the hair,” he says. “We never went after what was actually important and scary and worthy of attack, which was his supporters. We called him racist instead of examining why he’s racist.”

The 2016 election was ruled, above all, by cheap shots. How fitting, then, that we got a president who careens through his speeches like a hack insult comic, complete with lazy current events commentary (“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”) and nasty jabs at perceived rivals, be they the U.S. judiciary, “sleep eyes Chuck Todd,” or NATO allies. The caustic us-vs.-them rhetoric has infected resisters as well as supporters. America is a nation entrenched, angry, and unwilling to humor the other point of view.

A chilling effect has already taken place at comedy clubs across the country. Comedians talk of employing a new calculus: Is this a pro-Trump crowd or an anti-Trump crowd? And if it’s the wrong one, will I bomb—or worse?

“I’ve had a lot of people bring up the racial attacks that have been happening, saying, ‘Hey, be careful out there’—including my own wife,” says Maz Jobrani, an Iranian-American comic who headlined the sarcastically-named Axis of Evil Comedy Tour during the George W. Bush Administration. “For the most part I know how to handle myself. Usually the clubs I’m working at have security and I can shut ‘em down because I have a microphone. Even so, I don’t know how radical it’s going to get.”

Shortly after the election, Bill Dawes headlined a show at the Laugh Factory in Reno, Nevada: “The booker was like, ‘Hey—be careful about the Trump stuff. There are a lot of gun-toters in the audience.’” Dawes told his usual jokes and the show went fine, but he now thinks about the politics of his crowd in a way he didn’t before.

Simply bringing up Trump can bring a crowd down. “The minute you say the word, ‘Trump’ people just go ‘Ohhhh,’” says Brendan Fitzgibbons, co-host of the weekly Gandhi, Is That You? stand-up comedy night in New York City. “It’s like you’ve dug yourself a hole. It’s a negative place to start from. It’s almost like saying ‘abortion’ or ‘Hitler.’”

“I’m sick of having to pay attention to all this shit. That will be the lasting grievance I have, is that I can’t zone out and stare at the wall, which is my greatest goddamn pleasure in life. That is an American right that has been taken away.” — John Mulaney

Just as liberal comedians watch what they say in Trump country, right-leaning ones tread carefully inside the liberal bubble. In the first few weeks after the election, Jared Freid, a New York City-based comedian who originally planned to vote for Trump—“I loved the idea of an outsider businessman coming in and running the country”—before abstaining from voting, skipped political humor when he performed at his home club, the Comedy Cellar. “I have to do well at the Cellar, that’s the best club in the world,” Freid said then. “I don’t have the luxury of pissing off half the group while working out stuff.”