Friends,
With a scene we all recognize: late-night hosts and SNL writers gleefully roasting Trump and his merry band of cabinet cosplayers, ICE Barbie, and RFK Jr.‘s crusade against germ theory. It’s cathartic, it’s meme-able, and it’s also basically a very expensive pressure-release valve wearing a bow tie. Elitist satire, punches down at the “basket of deplorables,” makes liberals feel smart for two commercial breaks, and then leaves the actual machinery of power, the corporations, the war industry, the surveillance state, the Democratic Party that helped conjure Trump in the first place, entirely untouched. Congratulations, we own the libs’ opponents in a viral clip; the billionaires own everything else.
To make the point sting, I reach for Antonio Gramsci, who warned that this kind of smug ridicule is counterproductive and called instead for “passionate sarcasm” aimed at the institutions and myths propping up capitalism and fascism, not at the guy in the MAGA hat at the diner. Real satire, in this view, should acknowledge that ordinary people have real grievances, and then go for the throat of the system exploiting them, rather than treating half the country as a punchline. Otherwise you just get cynicism, self-congratulation, and a widening moat between the “enlightened” and the “deplorable,” which, awkwardly, is exactly the swamp fascism thrives in.
The historical gag reel is where the comedy curdles. I’m reminded that Weimar Berlin also had brilliant cabaret comics mocking the Nazis, right up until the Nazis stopped laughing, shut the cabarets, and shipped performers like Fritz Grünbaum, of the immortal power-outage quip about stumbling into “National Socialist culture,” off to Dachau, where he died. Cue Trump gloating that Colbert is “finished,” posting an AI video of himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster, and predicting the “beginning of the end” for late night. In fascist regimes, jokes about the leader become a crime, while jokes about opponents and minorities remain not just legal but encouraged. The comedy license, in other words, gets renewed selectively.
The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran, exiled under Erdoğan, whose playbook reads like a grim sitcom bible: split society into the “real people” vs. the “corrupt elite,” anoint a leader who claims to be the real people incarnate, dissolve truth, retire shame, normalize cruelty, hollow out institutions while everyone chants “the institutions will hold,” and shrink the circle of “us” until your neighbors are suspects. Americans, she warns, are currently at the “the institutions will hold” stage, which historically is the part right before they don’t.
My serious punchline is this: reducing the catastrophe to a clown show around Trump, his sycophantic cabinet, his weirdest appointees, his tweets, lets the deeper rot off the hook—the failed courts and Congress and media, the austerity, deindustrialization, the largest upward wealth transfer in US history, the endless wars, and a surveillance apparatus that makes each of us the most-photographed hominid in evolutionary history. Mocking the buffoons without naming the system that produced and protects them isn’t resistance; it’s the warm-up act. The buffoons are ridiculous, yes. But if we keep laughing only at them, the title of the piece becomes the whole plot: the joke is on us.
In Solidarity,
Gamy Enriquez, MPA
