Nowadays, the President’s sense of humor has been examined exhaustively. The consensus seems to be that either he doesn’t possess one at all, or that it is so subtle that most people don’t get it -- except, perhaps a gang of 12 year old boys having a food fight in their cafeteria. He could even be John Belushi funny.
You can Google Trump’s “only joking” statements by the hundreds, which shore up the contention that he is channeling John Belushi during one of his less sober moments.
Some of the best (or worst) examples are Sean Spicer claiming Trump was just funning when he asked the Kremlin to do a hack on Mrs. Clinton’s emails while on the campaign trail. Or how about that embarrassing moment that ended when Sarah Huckabee Sanders (no relation to the Colonel) said “I think he was just making a joke,” when Trump recommended that cops bounce prisoner’s heads off the door jambs of their squad cars.
Lucky for us, Happy Hicks, who handles White House communications on a sub rosa level, recently told The Washingtonian that Trump, quote-unquote, “has a brilliant sense of humor.” So did ________________ (fill in your own paranoid leader.)
Most people know by now that in Washingtonese, when you are ‘joking’ you are actually attacking -- as in “Who cut your hair, Helen Keller? Just kidding!”
An interesting sidelight about this whole eventyr is that Trump and his minions have a very selective sense of humor. Or very tedious, might be a better way of putting it. How many photoshopped pictures of the President hitting people with golf balls or having them slammed into with trains does the public really want?
There are no ‘poor taste’ filters on Twitter, although there certainly ought to be. Trump should probably add an emoji to let us know when he’s joking and when he’s actually insanely mad. This might help clear up ambivalent tweets like the one thanking Putin for booting American diplomats out of Russia. A smiley face or a thundercloud with a lightning bolt would have been enormously helpful at that point. But then, maybe Trump is all about being ambivalent and not funny or serious. He wants to keep us guessing. That strategy, if that is his strategy, has certainly kept him in office longer than a lot of Beltway buffs predicted.
It just may be Trump’s perceived ambiguity that keeps us out of World War Three with North Korea. Calling its president Rocket Boy and then threatening to wipe his country off the map are not to be construed as a direct insult and threat, but rather a whimsical outpouring of presidential poetic license.
Yeah, that’s probably what it is . . .
(Thanks to Andrew Rosenthal of the NYTimes for giving me this idea to develop.)
No comments:
Post a Comment