The last edition of the HPR’s humor section was published in the Winter 2016 magazine. It was paltry, consisting of just one political cartoon entitled “Trump’s First 100 Days.” The jokes almost wrote themselves, and not in a good way: Obama questioning Trump’s citizenship, Canada closing the border after a massive influx of fleeing Americans, and Trump mistaking Africa for China. Low-hanging fruit, but I doubt it was particularly funny to anyone in December 2016: Democrats were too scared, and Republicans were too busy gloating.
For the next two years, the HPR published few to no humor pieces, and by the time I joined the masthead in December 2018, the defunct humor section had itself become the butt of many a joke. Every quarter, as we prepared for the next magazine, someone would propose bringing it back in an attempt to lighten the mood. No one could ever quite remember the reason for its demise, but without fail, the idea was dismissed out of hand, usually with a chorus of “Ha ha, good one” from the staff writers in attendance.
Humor had been a part of the HPR’s political commentary for years up until Fall 2016, so why the sudden downfall? Perhaps it became redundant.
If you wanted to mark a specific point where the line between political satire and American politics disappeared, you have a few options. You could use Aug. 24, 2014: the day Barack Obama’s decision to wear a tan suit turned into a scandal and triggered a media frenzy. You could use June 16, 2015: the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. Jan. 20, 2017 could also work: the date Trump was sworn in. But maybe the best choice is from right before that final edition of the humor section was published: Nov. 8, 2016 — the day Trump was elected president. On that Tuesday, the satirical character won. There was no longer a theater of the absurd; politics became the absurd. The Simpsons came true.
Over the intervening six years, much has been written about the challenges facing political comedy in an age where the federal government appears to be a marionette doll for the showrunners of “Veep.” Satire is supposed to be fun, sure — political comedy always has to balance a dual mandate to entertain and inform in a way that traditional commentary does not — but it’s also supposed to provoke. The best political comedy exposes hypocrisy and pillaries those on the pedestal while keeping just enough realism and bite to serve as a warning: If you let your leaders act absurdly, you could get absurdly bad outcomes. When the hypocrisy is so obvious it needs no illumination and the officials concoct crazier schemes than the comics can dream, there seems to be little room left for ridicule. The humor disappears when the crazy is constant, and it’s too late to warn of the consequences. They’re already here.
And so during the Trump administration, despite the seemingly unending supply of mockable content, comedy suffered. Numerous late-night shows essentially premised on mocking the Trump administration launched only to flop within the span of a single presidential term. There were exceptions, of course, most notably “Saturday Night Live” skits anchored around Alec Baldwin’s Trump. But in general, comedy suffered in artistry even as some shows pulled in big television audiences. In a moment calling more for catharsis than comedy, John Oliver spoke for many in the industry when he remarked that “as a human being and a comedian, [he could not] wait for this to be over.”
This HPR issue, six years after the last humor section, brings the publication full circle. And though much has changed since 2016, there remains a sense of deja vu. We’re still confronting many of the same challenges — the most read article on the HPR’s website in Winter 2016 was titled “Using Dostoyevsky to Understand Vladimir Putin’s Aggression,” — as well as daunting new ones. Coming out of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, we wonder if the 2020s can live up to the promise of the 21st century. So as the HPR commits an entire issue to laughter, it’s important to think about the implications. What does choosing this time say about our politics and our world? What role does humor rightfully play in our political discourse?
An optimistic reading: Perhaps the return to humor reflects politics’s return to “normal.” There’s an argument for this. If nothing else, the Biden administration certainly takes governance seriously; in his first speech of the 2020 campaign, a central theme was Biden’s belief that “the American people want their government to work.” And even though, as I wrote this note, House Republicans were engaged in a series of votes somehow more repetitive than “Groundhog Day” trying to choose a speaker, overall, the government feels more focused again. The further we get from the Trump administration, the more it seems like an aberration. Probably a good thing for the national psyche, though perhaps dangerous if we fully let our guard down.
But this reading of humor’s return still doesn’t answer the question of “why” political humor is necessary. For one, the warning role of satire is becoming more important again. As government returns to relative stability, it is good to be reminded of the dangers of the clowns and the consequences of unseriousness. But this is only half of the role of comedy, and I don’t think it fully explains the recent reawakening of political humor.
Comedy informs and foreshadows, yes, but it also entertains. Comedy engenders laughter, and after the past six years we’ve had, we need the relief. Around the country and the world, we are exhausted. We need to get off the bad news merry-go-round, and the best comedy offers a momentary escape from the mental burdens of living in 2023 … Even if it only lasts as long as a chuckle.
So as we begin a new year, we shall see if we can bring humor back into balance. We need it, now more than ever, to remind us of the dangers of where we’ve been and to enliven our spirits through the challenges we still have to face. To laugh and to joke is very deeply human; even Zelenskyy enjoyed a joke or two as he visited the United States to ask for support in Europe’s first land war in 75 years. We would do well to follow his example. No matter what we face in 2023, let us confront the challenges with humor by our side.
