In the Year of Trump, the Joke Was On Us
But Trump’s act isn’t all about race. He’s also scoring points by mining the same mainstream frustrations over language-policing and political correctness that made Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay famous. Trump’s broadsides about Megyn Kelly aren’t that far off from the Dice-Man’s “Pattycake” routine.
The difference is, Clay and Kinison and comedians like them were trying to make a point about the absurdity of policing away forbidden thoughts, while Trump is basically a cretinous dinosaur who doesn’t understand why slurs about periods or the disabled or “the blacks” were ever made taboo in the first place. He’s not pushing back with a laugh, from a nightclub. He wants to do it from the Oval Office. Even Dice Clay thinks he’s nuts.
All comedy is about misunderstandings. A little town gets word that a government inspector is coming, so it mistakenly rolls out the red carpet for a visiting drunk on a gambling spree.
2015 was the same kind of mistaken-identity tale. The Silent Majority has been waiting 50 years for a prophet, but this year it settled for a billionaire loudmouth with a comb-over and a personality disorder. Like all comedies, this one is bound to end with an explosion of unintended consequences. What we won’t know until 2016 is whether this joke will end up being on all of us — or just those of us who waited too long to take Trump’s accidental war seriously.
In the Year of Trump, the Joke Was On Us, Page 4 of 4