Send in the Clowns
Post-woke comedy requires the court jesters to speak truth to the king
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Marc Maron has a message for all the “‘anti-woke’ comics” who were Big Mad that they couldn’t tell jokes about trans people, the disabled, immigrants, and the like. DEI is gone, but so are a lot of refugees, law-abiding immigrants, and basic rights. “I hope it was all worth it so you can say the R-word again,” wrote Maron last month on his podcast’s blog.
Initially, bless their hearts, the anti-woke comedians were thrilled. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, former Republican congressman Lee Zeldin used the R-word in reference to AOC. “You can say that now,” Fox News’ self-described comedian Greg Gutfield reassured his studio audience. “It’s OK.”
“The word ‘r------d’ is back, and it’s one of the great cultural victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts,” said Joe Rogan on his show in April.
I bet their mommas are real proud of them for the great cultural victory of getting to use that word. As fellow “podcast bro” Andrew Schultz told The New York Times, “There’s always going to be somebody offended by a word or opinion, so at a certain point, what do you do? You curtail how you speak completely so that you don’t offend people?”
Exactly, dude. Frame that under glass and hang it over the mantel, because you really got a big win there. Boy howdy. I mean, making it safe for hack comedians to use the R-word has got to rank up there with what, I dunno, Hamilton, the increased availability of Greek yogurt since the turn of the century, and the COVID vaccines, though admittedly I realize that’s a sore subject with y’all. My bad.
The anti-woke backlash in comedy reached its highest articulation in Neal Brennan’s 2001 Netflix special Crazy Good. Mocking those who took issue with his buddy Dave Chappell’s controversial jokes about trans people, Brennan said, “How corrupt is the rest of society that we’re talking about a serious issue [and] people go, ‘Well what do the clowns think?” This was as close as the anti-woke comedians got to making me laugh in a thought-provoking way. Still, the joke struck a logical-but-not-true note, like a non-load-bearing wall inside a home. Something wasn’t quite right about the joke.
Come to find out that the real anti-woke humor was laying there in the middle of the road all along, waiting for someone to hit it. In his new special Panicked (which debuts Friday on HBO Max), Maron mocked “the kind of personality who is going to bring down a party because of their political beliefs.” Maron has a word for that kind of person: “buzzkill.”
“We annoyed them into fascism,” he jokes. And you know what? Fair. I’ve been at that party. Hell, I’ve been that person. Being the people who go around banning words looks, to a lot of people, like the people who go around banning books. We looked like puritanical—Maron’s right here—buzzkills, which for all its self-serious censoriousness is also a profoundly silly look.
Noted.
But now the game has changed, and democracy’s gone into sudden-death overtime. Even Rogan, notwithstanding the glorious cultural victory regarding the R-word, has turned against Trump because of immigration raids targeting migrant workers and not gang members. “It’s insane,” he said earlier this month on his podcast. “Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers — just construction workers, showing up in construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”
As anti-woke becomes a spent force comedically as it is used to, as Maron says, “dismantle all progressive institutions,” the comic’s role in the second Trump administration has changed, too. Before, as Molly Jong Fast wrote in the wake of CBS firing late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, “I thought if we could laugh at MAGA hard enough, maybe Mr. Trump would go away, ashamed. But we should realize that under this administration, being funny and famous will not protect you.”
“What are you, some kind of dictator from the Middle East?”
We thought, or at least I did, that if we excised him and his Jan. 6-type followers from the body politic, we could kill that tumor and restore the country to something approaching normalcy. Part of that we tried to accomplish with institutions—see also: impeachments—and part of that we thought we could accomplish by mocking Trump and his unf*ckable incel buddies into cultural oblivion. For those of us used to American progress going up and to the right, the strategy had a seductive gravitational pull. To my shame, I was one of the last soldiers manning these ramparts, and the disappointment that the plan didn’t work nearly ruined me.
Now we’re here, and not everyone is clear on what’s going on. Speaking on the Good One podcast, Maron said, “I have a hard time with … centrist Democrats and some of the left … as … framing this as a two-party problem. It’s an authoritarian problem. And … until someone starts speaking in that language … on a big platform in a real way … there’s no two-party solution to authoritarianism.”
This is why the South Park episode depicting Trump as a litigious homosexual in a relationship with Satan is so shockingly effective. The show also satirizes Christian nationalism being imposed on public schools, cuts to NPR, the death of woke, the surrender of corporate-owned news media, and tariffs imposed on Canada. “What are you,” the Canadian ambassador says to Trump, “some kind of dictator from the Middle East?”
“Like, you guys are exactly alike.”
Yeah, kinda. The sharpest daggers are reserved for the President who is animated differently than most of their characters. The last time they animated photographs to present an exaggerated expression of a character’s personality was in the 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. That character was Saddam Hussein who was also depicted as being Satan’s lover. Apparently Satan has a type. “You remind me more and more of this guy I used to date,” Satan whines to a naked Trump. “Like, a lot. Like, you guys are exactly alike.”
Kudos to South Park’s co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for understanding the assignment. While a lot of the initial attention focused on Trump’s micropenis, less noted was their portrayal of Trump as an authoritarian, kinda like Satan’s old boyfriend, the dictator from the Middle East. Like, they’re exactly alike.
And this is when the penny dropped for me on what Brennan got wrong about clowns. Court jesters used to serve a vital role of telling a sovereign an uncomfortable truth that would get anyone else thrown in the dungeon, or worse. And because they did it wearing a funny hat meant to mimic donkey ears—thus, an ass—the jester, by clowning around, got away with telling the truth.
We didn’t have kings in America on purpose. Fought a whole war about this, in fact. Now we’ve got this joker who fancies himself a king who can call out the troops if he doesn’t like that the peasants are protesting. The owners of the Fourth Estate are surrendering in advance, and the judicial branch is broken, unable to support the weight of consitutional review. The last line of defense for our democracy might be mocking the king’s pathetic nudity while his courtiers compliment his new clothes.
Send in the clowns.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of the NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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The interesting thing about the anti woke is that they never were not allowed to use the r word or to make fun of the least powerful members of society.
There was no cancellation, there was no freedom of speech issues. You can still say it or do it, there are no laws compelling you to update your vocabulary. He'll, you can still use the N word if you so desire without fear of fine or jail term. BUT, that doesn't mean I have to go to your show, laugh at your jokes or feel remorse because you become shunned by polite society.
So when Joe Rogan or that wall street traitor dude say thank god Trump won so we can say these things again, is that its not true. A good portion of society is still going to look at you sideways and avoid your company because of such digressions. And so, guess what? You're still gonna refrain from using such terms. So, you never won a damn thing and society keeps progressing regardless.
Worth noting that Trump was depicted as a Canadian (with a two-part head) and even says "aboot" for "about."
And South Park is created week by week. I hope every show is an up-to-date assault on Pres. MicroPenis.