Joking Around

Anything goes in American comedy, no matter how hurtful, outrageous or downright dishonest.

- Paul Thomas

Donald Trump’s America is a paradox: a target-rich environment for humorists but one in which it’s increasingly hard to distinguish reality from outlandish satire. This week, for instance, Trump’s legal spokesman Rudy Giuliani, a former gung-ho prosecutor, insisted the President cannot be indicted while in office, even if he commits murder. Was he having a laugh? Despite its rich comic tradition, contemporary America finds it hard to agree on what is and isn’t a joke.

Consider the following:

Comedian Samantha Bee called the President’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, a “feckless c**t” for posting a pretty photo on Instagram of herself and her infant son Theodore as US immigration officials were enforcing her father’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border as a deterrent to their trying to get into the US.

White House aide Kelly Sadler said seriously ill Senator John McCain’s opposition to President Trump’s nominee for CIA director didn’t matter because “he’s dying anyway”.

Apropos of who knows what, TV star Roseanne Barr tweeted, “muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby=vj”. The vj in question is Valerie Jarrett, an Iranian-born African-American and senior aide to Barack Obama when he was in the White House.

Observing that nothing else in nature matches the colour of Trump’s hair and an orangutan’s beard, satirist Bill Maher speculated in 2013 that the future President might be the spawn of a sexual encounter between his mother and an orangutan in Brooklyn Zoo. Maher offered Trump US$5 million if he conclusively proved otherwise.