First They Come for the Comedians

Authoritarians hate being mocked. And rage at mockery is Trump's origin story.

Photo by antonio molinari on Unsplash

It has often been observed that without Barack Obama, we wouldn’t have Donald Trump. And what most people mean by that is true: That without the deep racism and racial resentment that exploded in response to a Black president, and without the total social overhaul that the first female president coming on the heels of the first Black president suggested, a demagogue like Trump could never have won.

But there’s a more specific reason that without Barack Obama, we wouldn’t have Donald Trump, and that’s the moment Obama mocked Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

It was 2009 and Obama’s first term. Trump was one of the loudest voices behind the “birther” conspiracy theory, raging on right-wing television that the president was not born in America and demanding Obama’s long-form birth certificate. The Obama administration released the long-form birth certificate hoping that would quell the conspiracy once and for all (spoiler, it didn’t), and Obama used the podium at the correspondents’ dinner, long a venue for roasting and ribbing, to take aim at Trump, who sat in the audience.

“Donald Trump is here tonight,” he said. “Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice—at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night.”

Everyone laughed. Trump fumed. And then comedian Seth Meyers took the stage and added, “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

Close Trump allies have said that was the moment it was clear he would run. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Men with a penchant for total control tend to be ridiculous thin-skinned. They do not do well with even gentle ribbing, and they are quick to feel humiliated. It’s no surprise, then, that dictators throughout history have taken aim at comedians, satirists, and artists. These are the people who not only make the authoritarians feel insufficiently revered, but reveal the authoritarians as the jokes they are. In past eras, authoritarians may simply have arrested or forcibly silenced comedians. Now, they use the power and pressure of the state to push other entities — TV networks, for example — to cancel and silence them.

Early in his rule, Russian leader Vladimir Putin famously got a comedic puppet show cancelled because he didn’t like the way he was portrayed — even as the show was the most popular one in the country. The comedian Youssef, known as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart,” was under such threat from two different regimes that he eventually fled the country. Muslim comedians in India have been arrested for mocking Modi. A German comedian faced criminal charges after performing a poem satirizing Turkish strongman leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This is why comedian Jon Stewart called comedians “the banana peel in the coal mine” in a 2022 speech at the Kennedy Center. “When a society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first.”

Donald Trump spoke at the UN General Assembly this week in a rambling, incoherent speech in which he insulted the other attendees and spoke of his own country as a behemoth that he restored to great glory. It was reminiscent of other rambling, incoherent diatribes offered at the UN by various other unhinged strongmen, most notably former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and former Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadeinejad. Back in 2007, when Ahmadeinejad was in New York for the General Assembly and there was a big dust-up over whether he should be permitted to speak at Columbia University, Saturday Night Live aired a segment starring Andy Samberg serenading Fred Armisen as Ahmadeinejad. It’s worth a watch, because (a) it’s still funny, and (b) it shows the power of comedy in a free society to strike to the heart of an authoritarian’s utter ridiculousness. No amount of protest and no number of op/eds could have as effectively revealed Ahmadeinejad for the weak little fanatic he was. It was also a kind of mockery to which he was wholly unaccustomed, being the leader of a nation in which mocking the leader could land you in jail or worse. I remember watching that segment and thinking, totally without irony: God bless America.

Anyway, this is a newsletter about Jimmy Kimmel, and I hope you understand why.

xx Jill