The truth is not always funny. You may have heard, in the past year, that irony and satire are dead, that in the age of Trump they have become indistinguishable from their opposites. Liberal comedians and critics are volubly alarmed, producing essays and think pieces and giving asides in interviews about Trump’s immunity to satire, about the inexplicably malevolent humor of “trolls,” about the triumphs and failures of late-night shows, about the inexaggerable absurdity of the news. Everyone recognizes that something essential to comedy is failing: the power to defeat lies. Very few have asked how comedy came by that power in the first place.
Comedy is not dead, but it is changing. And comedy’s association with honesty is far more recent than we might think. You and I just happen to have grown up during an unusual period in the history of comedy, one in which it became strangely bound up with truth and virtue. Trump, thank God, has cut the knot.
You can hear the ropes groaning in Emily Nussbaum’s essay about humor and the 2016 election, which eloquently diagnoses the problem and just as eloquently sneaks away from it. When she was a kid, she writes,
"I had the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—that meant freedom for everyone. But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried farther than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur."
Nussbaum’s crisis of faith is a perfect index of the conventional wisdom of comedy in 2017. Each of the observations in that second paragraph communicates an attitude about comedy: that internet trolls, for instance, “dispense” jokes, insentiently, rather than tell them; that jokes can “accelerate” lies, as though irony were a kind of artificial additive to language.