Last Friday, on the day of President Trump’s Inauguration, a masked assailant in Washington punched the white-nationalist political activist Richard Spencer in the head. Spencer was giving an interview on camera at the time, talking about his Pepe the Frog lapel pin, and (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rh1dhur4aI) of the attack promptly went viral. In November, during a conference of alt-right conservatives celebrating Trump's win, Spencer addressed the crowd by saying, "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" His words were met by a flurry of Hitler salutes from members of the audience. Last Friday, a debate flourished online about whether the assault had been justified. Or, as the Web soon reframed the question: Is it O.K. to punch a Nazi? The jokes came fast, with Indiana Jones, Wonder Woman, and the Blues Brothers all brought out as certain “yes” votes. Even if you believe that all acts of violence are counterproductive, even when directed against white supremacists, there was a kind of giddiness in watching as Spencer, a devotee of the dark arts of the political meme, had the Web turn against him.
One of the most elaborate responses to the punch came later in the day, when the comedian and songwriter Tim Heidecker released a short piano ballad online, in which he imagined himself, like a modern Moses, come down from the mountaintop with a new message from God, who weighed in on the question it seemed everyone was asking: “If you see Richard Spencer / Won't you give him a big black eye? / Come at him swinging / Ain't no one gonna cry.” The song, titled simply "Richard Spencer," which Heidecker re-released a few days later, on Bandcamp, with a fuller arrangement (and with the proceeds of downloads going to benefit the N.A.A.C.P.), is one of a handful of sneakily moving and bitterly funny protest songs that Heidecker, who is best known as one half of the multiplatform weird-out comedy duo Tim & Eric, has written recently about Trump and the surge of reactionary politics he has unleashed. In April, he wrote a song from the perspective of Trump's private pilot, imagining Trump's death in a plane crash. (This was back when Trump was a private citizen.) In August, he released "I Am a Cuck," set to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock," with lyrics that appropriated the slogans and epithets favored by Trump's most aggressive backers, and turned them on himself. (A cuck, short for cuckold, is, according to the pissed-off men who use the word, an emasculated man who has lost his power by submitting to feminism and multiculturalism.) "A cuck has no fun," Heidecker sings. "And a libtard always cries."
As Emily Nussbaum wrote recently in the magazine, during the Presidential campaign Trump and his supporters were the ones who told the more effective, if crude and angry, jokes—or were at least the ones who got the bigger laughs. Many popular comedians went in hard against Trump, ridiculing him as being brazenly unfit for the Presidency—and, by extension, ridiculing anyone who might consider voting for him—only to find that their arguments had little effect in the places where it turned out to matter. But Trump’s Inauguration last week prompted many different forms of regrouping, and one of the powerful forces to emerge from the weekend was humor—not only, as Alexandra Schwartz has written, at the Women’s Marches but also among professional comedians grappling with the power of jokes as a form of dissent.
Heidecker is known for creating grotesque characters and unsettling situations that explore what he once described to Marc Maron as the "garbage" of modern life. "I Am a Cuck" was familiar ground; he was trolling the trolls, repurposing the nonsense and vulgarity of their corner of the Web to create a biting bit of satire—it was the kind of thing alt-righters might have written themselves. But in another song, "Trump Tower," which Heidecker wrote just after the election but released this week, he is more introspective; he confesses that, like many others, he had thought of Trump mostly as a comedic foil, and assumed that after Trump "choked" in the election he would go back to what he calls his "little scene." Instead, Heidecker confronts a different reality. “I'll be hell-bent to call that motherfucker President," he sings in the song’s rousing climax. But he ends on a more ambivalent note, recognizing the limited scope of this kind of provocation: "Thank God for the First Amendment ... letting me vent." For now.
A different kind of anti-Trump comedy was put forth last Saturday, when the comedian Aziz Ansari hosted "Saturday Night Live." In his opening monologue, Ansari said of the President, who has spent the past few months dabbling as a critic of the show on Twitter, "Pretty cool to know that he's probably at home watching a brown guy make fun of him, though, right?" Yet after that jab, Ansari focussed less on making fun of Trump than on addressing the Trump supporters he dubbed the "lower-case K.K.K.," who had been emboldened by the election and felt free to publicly express their bigotry. "You've got to go back to pretending," Ansari pleaded to these un-closeted racists, noting that he recognized the past few years must have been hard on them, what with the success of "Empire," "Hamilton," and a newly diverse "Star Wars."
Still, Ansari insisted, these people were the exception among Trump supporters. "We can't demonize everyone that voted for Trump," he said, pointing out that sixty-three million Americans couldn't all be bad. "As long as we treat each other with respect, and remember that ultimately we're all Americans, we'll be fine." At the end, Ansari asked President Trump to consider writing a speech denouncing the racist fringe among his supporters—the kind of unifying speech that George W. Bush gave after September 11th, in which he said that the United States was not at war with Islam. "Sixteen years ago, I was certain this guy was a dildo," he said, of Bush. "Now I'm sitting there like, 'He guided us with his eloquence.' "
Ansari was funny, charming, calm, and reasonable—it was the standup version of the kind of measured rhetoric and optimistic view of America that characterized Barack Obama's last weeks in the Presidency. Yet, like Obama's final speeches, the set felt at once reassuring and not quite up to the ugly reality of the moment. In this case, Ansari is correct that Americans voted for Trump for many different reasons, but he minimizes Trump's own bigotry, which propelled him into the political arena and then, during the course of the campaign, to victory. Trump could never give a speech in which he called out the racists without undergoing an enormous and, as he might put it, "unpresidented" process of self-examination.
Still, if Ansari's set expressed a bit of wishful thinking, it nonetheless pointed to a kind of political comedy that might reach a wider audience—one that recognizes and speaks to a majority of the well-intentioned, one that focusses less on recrimination and retribution toward fellow-citizens than it does on asking people to take a fresh look at seemingly entrenched divisions, one that speaks to the better parts of people, and talks about our flaws more as foibles than sicknesses. Whether or not this kind of comedy can also be truly honest remains to be seen.
But there is a third kind of humor that could ultimately do the most to deflate Trump. Last weekend, in an attempt to explain the new Administration's insistence on lying about the size of the crowds at Trump's Inauguration, Kellyanne Conway went on "Meet the Press" to explain that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had been offering "alternative facts." Trump's team knows the political power of a concise, catchy, and easily repeated phrase—and they must recognize, in "alternative facts," a potential crack in the veneer of Trumpism. The phrase is not simply plainly ridiculous, it’s pathetically so. It's the kind of thing that an aspiring strongman like Trump himself would never say—he just blusters, pretending, or maybe even believing, that the things he says are the real facts, the only facts. Instead, it's what the semi-reasonable people who work for him have to come up with in order to serve two masters—Trump on the one hand and reality on the other. "He believes what he believes," Spicer later said about his boss.
In the past few days, the phrase has been popping up everywhere. In the sports world, as Deadspin has pointed out, various N.B.A. coaches have been making a version of the same "alternative-fact" joke with reporters. Mike D'Antoni, of the Houston Rockets, when asked why his team had lost five of their past eight games, replied, "Actually we won all those games. I'm going with that alternative-fact thing." The Dallas Stars hockey team claimed on their scoreboard that attendance at a recent game was 1.5 million. The comedian Ellen DeGeneres, citing alternative facts, bragged that her movie "Finding Dory" was nominated for an Oscar. A pizza chain has begun selling an alternative-fact zero-calorie pizza, with bacon, pepperoni, sausage, and ham. It's not even a political joke anymore—Jimmy Fallon is making jokes about it. People are mocking not only Conway and Spicer but Trump as well, the man who sent his underlings out with the impossible task of selling the unsellable. The result is a different kind of comedy consensus: the ridicule of the majority. A good joke may have the power to diminish the new Trump Administration, especially if it’s one it unwittingly tells about itself.
