The truth is not always funny. You may have heard, in the past year, that irony and satire are dead, that in the age of Trump they have become indistinguishable from their opposites. Liberal comedians and critics are volubly alarmed, producing essays and think pieces and giving asides in interviews about Trump’s immunity to satire, about the inexplicably malevolent humor of “trolls,” about the triumphs and failures of late-night shows, about the inexaggerable absurdity of the news. Everyone recognizes that something essential to comedy is failing: the power to defeat lies. Very few have asked how comedy came by that power in the first place.
Comedy is not dead, but it is changing. And comedy’s association with honesty is far more recent than we might think. You and I just happen to have grown up during an unusual period in the history of comedy, one in which it became strangely bound up with truth and virtue. Trump, thank God, has cut the knot.
You can hear the ropes groaning in Emily Nussbaum’s essay about humor and the 2016 election, which eloquently diagnoses the problem and just as eloquently sneaks away from it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member