Late Night with Trump

Political Humor and the American Presidency

Stephen J. Farnsworth, S. Robert Lichter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429765414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political humor has been a staple of late-night television for decades. The Trump White House, however, has received significantly greater attention than that of past presidents, such as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and even Bill Clinton. In response to Trump's strident politics, late-night comics, including Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah and Jimmy Fallon, have sounded key policy notes, further blurring the boundary between news and satire. Weekly humorists, including John Oliver and Samantha Bee, extend the critique with in-depth probing of key issues, while Saturday Night Live continues to tap the progression from outrage to outrageousness.

Using unique content analysis techniques and qualitative discussions of political humor, Farnsworth and Lichter show how late-night political humor, and these seven programs in particular, have responded to the Trump presidency. Employing a dataset of more than 100, 000 late night jokes going back decades, these noted media scholars discuss how the treatment of Trump differs from previous presidents, and how the Trump era is likely to shape the future of political humor. The authors also employ public opinion survey data to consider the growing role these late-night programs play in framing public opinion and priorities. This book will interest scholars, the curious public, and students of politics, communications and the media, and contemporary American culture.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL HUMOR

Political humor has long been a staple of late night television. Large parts of the media audience turn to the post-prime-time comics for entertainment and even for an alternative source of news (Baym 2005). As far back as Senator John F. Kennedy’s appearance on The Tonight Show during the 1960 presidential election campaign, presidents and presidential candidates have sought to humanize their image and bolster their public standing by appearing on late night talk shows (Gould 1968; Lichter et al. 2015). They have done so to respond to satirical attacks, and to minimize future attacks, once the hosts began to incorporate increasing amounts of political material into their stand-up routines. The candidates have even redirected their campaign approaches in response to comedic barbs, such as when Al Gore tried to loosen up after being mocked as too stiff and overbearing in a Saturday Night Live skit about the first 2000 presidential debate (Jones 2010).

While a variety of presidents, presidential candidates and other political figures have faced the skewers of late night comics in recent decades, Donald Trump stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the amount of ridicule directed his way, first as a presidential candidate and then as president. Of course, he also makes a bad situation worse. By attacking on Twitter the late night comics who ridicule him, Trump draws even more attention to their attacks (Brice-Sadler 2018).

Partly owing to Trump’s outsized personality and his frequently outrageous pronouncements, the late night hosts had an unprecedented amount of material to work with during the combative 2016 presidential campaign and then during Trump’s time in the White House (Lichter et al. 2016; Farnsworth et al. 2017, 2018). The growing aggressiveness of late night comedians is also occurring in a media environment that expands the attention they receive. Market forces encourage the comics to do so when traditional news outlets connect with smaller and more partisan audiences, when growing numbers of news consumers want their media diet to be highly entertaining, and as the boundaries between news and satire have become increasingly blurred by journalists, news consumers and politicians alike.

This blurring of media roles can reach absurd lengths. During his heyday as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, survey respondents identified Jon Stewart as one of the most admired journalists in America, tying real-life network news anchors Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather in public admiration (Baumgartner and Morris, 2011). CBS reportedly even considered Stewart as a possible replacement anchor for the CBS Evening News (Eggerton 2005).

In this book, we use content analysis to study political humor in the age of Trump. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University coded the jokes on late night programs that focus on the president and his administration, identifying the source, target and topic of every humorous political comment during the opening monologues of the leading late night shows during the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump presidency.

We apply this content analysis approach to four leading late night comedy programs offering commentary at least four nights a week: The Daily Show on Comedy Central, The Late Show on CBS, The Tonight Show on NBC, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC. We also employ more qualitatively oriented discussions of the most prominent once-a-week humorists: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO, and of course Saturday Night Live on NBC. While far from a complete list of the late night programs we could examine, the comics selected provide a mix of broadcast and cable outlets and program formats. CMPA has coded late night comedy monologues for decades, and therefore we can employ data from previous analyses of presidential humor to provide a broader context for understanding the late night humorists’ treatment of Trump.

Humor as a Way to Cope with Life’s Challenges (Including Politics)

Humor has always been with us. Jokes provide a way to lighten the burdens of the day as well as to address the challenges of collective human existence. As long as there have been human communities, there have been public desires to poke fun at their leaders. The Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans of antiquity all provided ways of mocking authorities to ease the burdens of daily survival (Berger 1997; Combs and Nimmo 1996). “There is, in human beings, it would seem, a need to laugh at ourselves and this need takes many different forms—from plays and poems to cartoons, comic strips, and jokes,” notes Arthur Asa Berger (2011: 237).

Humor is a key coping mechanism for a world run by others, people who claim or at least presume to be one’s betters. Jokes and mockery seem to be common responses to the sometimes-unpleasant realities of the moment, whatever they might be. Even where the expression of critical humor could be dangerous, it has continued to occur in some fashion. Bitter political humor circulated underground in totalitarian societies like the Soviet Union, even as it thrived in freer societies (Combs and Nimmo 1996).

The Central Intelligence Agency recently released some Soviet-era political jokes demonstrating the universality of humor, even of the politically risky sort: “A man was jailed 15 years for calling Joseph Stalin a fathead. One year for sedition, 14 years for revealing a state secret” (quoted in Hopper 2018).

While humor appears to be something close to a universal human desire, undertaking satire could be dangerous if conducted out in the open in some times and places. Earlier Greek comedy, like that of Aristophanes, delighted in ridiculing the powerful, something permitted openly during the days of Greek self-rule. Later, the military successes of Alexander the Great led to more centralized governmental control and a new set of leaders who took a dim view of political satire. As a result, subsequent generations of Greek writers focused their humor on domestic, not political, matters.

There’s comedy tonight so long as it doesn’t threaten the imperial powers that be. Early in the history of civilization, it became very clear to those in authority that political comedy was dangerous, something that needed to be suppressed or displaced.

(Combs and Nimmo 1996: 5)

The development of modern political institutions and increasing public literacy created a fertile environment for political satire and comedy. During the Renaissance, Machiavelli offered up plays that mocked the political authorities he examined in a more serious vein in works like The Prince. With apparent glee, Dante consigned many political leaders of his era to hell in his Divine Comedy. In England, Shakespeare mocked political figures for vanity and poor judgment in his plays (though of course he provided flattering portrayals of some other leaders). More than a century later, Jonathan Swift wrote with venom about the British government’s failure to deal with famines in Ireland, satirically asserting that the Irish could solve the problem themselves by eating their children.

On this side of the Atlantic, the distant British monarchy and the restive nature of the colonials created a vibrant culture of political humor comparable to that found in Europe and one that if anything intensified as the years went by. The mocking gibes of Ben Franklin during the colonial era later gave way to the bitter humor of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken in a subversive tradition that has existed throughout America’s history (Combs and Nimmo 1996).

Since the nation’s founding, US political humor has often focused on the virility or presumed lack thereof of politicians and leading figures in political discourse. Two centuries ago, humorists attacked President James Madison along these lines for his allegedly inept leadership during the War of 1812 – some commentators mocked him as Mrs. Madison’s husband. Decades later another generation of humorists attacked Mark Twain for his opposition to US policies in the Spanish–American War, referring to him as an “aunt” (Winter 2011).

Like the jesters or “fools” of European royal courts, who had some license to “speak truth to power” at the royal court via a sharp comment, today’s late night humorists occupy a space of “play” that protects them, at least to a degree. That space enables them to say taboo things that may be too critical or too controversial to be expressed safely by mainstream political actors without severe consequences (Gilbert 2004). The absurdity of the extreme exaggerations, in other words, provides a level of “comedic insulation” that minimizes the repercussions against humorists. They can always claim they were only kidding if the authorities (or the audience) view the joke as going too far (Palmer 1988).

Societies may relish the opportunity to cut their political leaders down to size, or at least enjoy others doing so in an entertaining way. A joke, even a sharp one, is a humorous way to try to reduce the arrogance and perhaps the creeping authoritarianism that is a potential risk in centralized, powerful, modern governments, even ones possessing democratic institutions and sentiments. In fact, the more arrogant the leader, the larger the target that leader represents.

But political humor is more than a defense against political figures who think too highly of themselves. Comedy also contains at its core an expression of optimism: the conviction that the future can be brighter than the past.

A comic perspective fearlessly diagnoses the ridiculousness of politics, including but not endorsing the harm or pain; it is irreverent, even subversive, but not doctrinaire, since doctrine is just another part of the political comedy. … Comedy offers a hopeful and larger view of things: beyond every winter chill is a fertile new spring, where death is carried away and there are new human tangles for our comic pleasure.

(Combs and Nimmo 1996: 12)

Indeed, in times of great suffering, like the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attacks of 2001, many Americans found comfort in the revival of humor following a period of deep mourning. When Saturday Night Live returned to the air a few weeks after the horrific 9/11 attacks, the program began with a solemn tribute to New York City’s first responders, followed by permission to resume the jokes provided by none other than Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the heroic face of America’s largest city in the weeks after the Twin Towers fell.

Viewers who tuned in on September 29 to the first show that aired after the attacks found New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani opening the night surrounded by city firefighters and police officers. After an earnest discussion of the attacks and the nature of heroism, followed by a musical performance by Paul Simon, SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michaels joined Giuliani on stage, and the mayor affirmed the significance of SNL to New York City as “one of our great New York City institutions.” After an awkward pause, Michaels asked Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” The audience laughed anxiously, perhaps in anticipation of a restored play frame. Giuliani responded to Michael’s question with one of his own: “Why start now?” Seemingly relieved, the live audience laughed again, harder, at the political comedian and the comedic politician.

(Greene and Gournelos 2011: xii)

If comedy sometimes seems to involve the construction of pain followed by time, the horrific deaths of 9/11 followed by the jokes of late September suggested to a shell-shocked country that the period of mourning would not last forever and normality would soon return to the traumatized nation.

The Iraq War, which began less than two years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, helped make what was old new again for political humor. Theaters revived traditional stories of political satire, including Lysistrata and Hair, during the Iraq War years, even though they harked back to earlier conflicts, like the Peloponnesian War of antiquity or the more recent war in Vietnam (Winter 2011). On the April 23, 2003 edition of The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart channeled the 1964 Cold War parody film Dr. Strangelove, explicitly comparing Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a hawkish voice in policy debates, to the ex-Nazi rocket scientist played by Peter Sellers. Stewart remarked Wolfowitz was “a wheelchair away from Dr. Strangelove” (quoted in Winter 2011: 170).

The relative powerlessness of most comedians offers some further insulation from retaliation, at least apart from periods of intense crisis. Comics’ positions outside the power structure can make them less threatening and therefore more able to offer biting social criticism (Gilbert 2004). It is not as if comedians have votes in Congress, after all.

Consider, for example, Stephen Colbert’s commentary about President George W. Bush...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Importance of Political Humor
• 2. The Blustering Billionaire of Talk Shows and Twitter
• 3. Candidate Trump and Campaign Comedy
• 4. How POTUS Plays on Late Night
• 5. Political Consequences of Late Night Humor
• 6. The (Near) Future of Political Humor
• About the Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index