Humour is effective as a line of attack against authoritarian post-truthers like Trump. And like post-truth, humour is about feelings and the effect on your audience. But Lasse Thomassen suggests that humour – used well – can help make us see new truths to which we were otherwise blind
When Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff recently lampooned Donald Trump, he painted the President as lazy, corrupt and out of touch. He did so with humour: ‘He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar’, Ossoff said.
The ‘travel with Natalie’ line seems to have been particularly effective in getting under Trump’s skin. Ossoff made a serious point about Trump’s ability to do the job of President, but he did so in a way that makes his audience laugh at Trump. It made both Trump and Natalie Harp look ridiculous. Trump himself often laughs at others, using nasty nicknames. But he has never been comfortable being the butt of a joke. In Trump’s world, to be laughed at equals weakness, and for Trump it has always been important to project an image of strength.
In Trump’s world, to be laughed at equals weakness, and for Trump it has always been important to project an image of strength
But is laughing at Trump an effective political tactic? Does it do anything other than further denigrating political discourse in post-truth world? I think so. Humour cannot stand on its own, but it is one way to fight authoritarian post-truthers like Trump, and it can help build solidarity too. To understand how, we must first understand what post-truth is, what it shares with humour, and how the two differ.
Trump is the face of post-truth. It is easy to forget, but there was a time before Donald Trump when we also worried about facts and truth.
In the early 2000s, George W. Bush was the face of post-truth before that term became popular. Not only did he claim to have instinctual access to truth, but he also treated facts as something to be created. A Bush aide complained to a journalist that ‘the reality-based community … believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ The aide then added: ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
The exchange revealed how the Bush administration thought about truth as truth-effect: a description of the world does not have to correspond to a state of affairs in the world. Instead, it is a form of political action that changes the world. On top of that, Bush appealed to his gut feeling, as if that gave him privileged access to the truth. Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the notion of truthiness to capture this: ‘Truthiness (noun) – the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.’ Years later, Colbert linked truthiness to post-truth and to the Trump Presidency (‘Trumpiness’).
What about humour? When Ossoff joked about Trump, he was describing a state of affairs: Trump travels with Natalie Harp at his side; Trump was gifted a luxury jet by Qatar, which has turned out not to be safe for travelling; and so on. But Ossoff is doing more than that. The way he describes things makes fun of Trump. Crucially, Ossoff makes us see Trump in a new light. This is what humour does: it makes us see things in a new way. Humour is performative: it describes reality, but that description also creates a new reality in which Trump is lazy, corrupt and out of touch. And humour works on feelings: jokes can be more or less clever, but in order to work they have to arouse feelings that will make us laugh.
If Trump’s post-truth discourse is about the effect it has in creating a new reality, so is humour. We do not judge jokes as true or false. What matters for jokes is their effect on the audience
If post-truth is about truth-effect, so is humour. If Trump’s post-truth discourse is about the effect it has in creating a new reality, so is humour. We do not judge jokes as true or false. What matters for jokes is their effect on the audience. All the facts reported about Trump may still have an effect, but humour makes those facts stick in a way that no fact-reporting journalist could achieve.
Humour shares something with Trump’s post-truth. That is why some flinch at the way Ossoff, Gavin Newsom and others make fun of Trump: it’s not serious. They think it means capitulating to Trumpian trash talk. That is certainly a risk. But my point is that it works. And we can still distinguish Ossoff making fun of Trump from what Trump does. First of all, when Ossoff makes jokes about Trump, he ties them to facts about Trump’s actions. And, when Trump makes jokes about others, the jokes are usually petty and mean-spirited.
Humour can be an effective way to criticise authoritarians, but humour can also build solidarity, creating ties of identification between the person telling a joke and their audience
Humour can be an effective way to criticise authorities, and even more so authoritarians. But humour can also build solidarity. All humour rests on and creates ties of identification between the person telling a joke and their audience. When we laugh with others, we come to share something – for instance, a shared idea of what is true. When we laugh at ‘travel with Natalie’ jokes, we not only laugh at Trump and Natalie Harp, we also laugh with others. Those others may be people already critical of Trump, but they may also be Trump supporters who suddenly find themselves laughing at their man.
We should embrace humour. Humour is not everything, but it is one way to fight against authoritarian post-truthers like Trump, and to create a better world.
