I was talking to someone recently about political caricature and I brought up the idea that humor and sarcasm and irony are good at exposing truths about institutions and established power but that you can't build something useful out of them. And the person I was talking to said that laughter can still be cathartic and useful to help people manage.
It's hard for me to disagree but I don't feel like laughter is helpful at this point in time. Removed from context, Trump is hilarious. On some level, we've been laughing at him the whole time. But it doesn't stop him in any way.
Patton Oswalt had a joke about the end of the Bush administration where he said people would come up to him and say "Oh man, you comedians are in trouble now that Bush isn't president. You aren't going to have anything to talk about." And he responds
Imagine for the last 8 years there were demons just flying around in the sky and they would randomly swoop down and sodomize people. And I wrote ten killer minutes about the sodomy demons and then the Pope banished them to another dimension and people go 'boy Patton you really miss those sodomy demons'
Much like senseless demons, Trump is formless. He's a void. He doesn't stand for anything. And I feel like the best way to build something is to be sincere.
Not that humor doesn't have a place--I just feel like in my lifetime we've been in a golden age of political humor and things are terrible. If political humor actually did anything, why are things like this?
