Trump’s Comedy Problem

Art by KCS 1/18

Rodney Dangerfield was funny. The way he strode onto a stage, his eyes wide open with a crooked countenance. We laughed. “I tell ya when I was a kid, all I knew was rejection. My yo-yo, it never came back."  His schtick revolved around his famous line: “I get no respect.”

Steve Martin launched his career in comedy wearing an arrow through his head. He played dumb.

Bill Murray became famous for his deadpan humor that essentially mocked himself. 

Will Ferrell called himself "a cotton-headed ninny muffin." 

Lucille Ball, perhaps the most popular comedienne of the 20th Century, played the zany housewife.

Great comedians are funny because they exaggerate and expose their ( and our) foibles. They’re anything but perfect, the same as we normal folks are not perfect. We laugh with them because we identify those feelings and insecurities. It’s called empathy (sorry Elon).

I've recently come up with a theory about our current, painfully insecure president. 

He’s failed as a businessman with six bankruptcies. Ironically, he made his fortune selling his name, his brand. Which is all air. Nothing there but a phony concept.

He’s failed as a president once and is fumbling again into a sorry excuse for a politician. He keeps telling us that he’s the greatest president whoever lived etc, etc. His redundancy and ego may, indeed, cause him to believe his own lies, but he’s faltering again in his role as leader.

Is he just dumb? Maybe. He was able to sell himself to unknowing voters and big money donors who saw opportunity with a president they could buy. You could call that smart. Or cunning. Or corrupt.

Currently he is taking the stage again. He believes he can save himself in front of an audience. Ever the showman, he adores himself when he's in the spotlight. His final encore, he believes, will be as the beloved comedian.

Granted, he wears funny extra-long ties and covers himself with gobs of clownish orange make-up. And he’s in love with that weird hairstyle of a rat’s-nest-on-fire. His presentation wreaks of humor. Yet his shtick is not funny. We laugh at him not with him. 

His jokes are derogatory. He insults other people, gives them juvenile nicknames. He boasts and berates.

His spiel on immigrants, his hands waving in and out like a baker squeezing dough, reveals a self-dealing contempt for people of color: “Somalia," he draws out the word for comedic inflection, calling the country "dirty, filthy, disgusting."

Folks are not buying his shtick. Latest polls by the Associated Press and NORC found that only 36-opercent approve of his job performance. The most recent Gallup poll shows 60-percent of Americans disapprove of his second term performance. 

Legislators in conservative Indiana voted on December 11 to reject gerrymandering their voting districts to favor Republicans, as instructed to do by His Highness. 

He's still got his dancing girls -- Pam, Karoline and Kristi -- but the whole act is getting stale. It's becoming as he would say, "a very very bad joke."