I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  “I probably read that when I was seventeen. Do you know how grim that was?” she fumed of that hard year, when she had been vulnerable to the most hideous kind of exploitation. “There was no view from my peak.” It flashed me back to 1984, when I was seventeen, earnestly marking up Roman Polanski’s memoir, reading John Updike, a passionate fan of Woody Allen. My life had been much easier than Gadsby’s; I was not, like her, afraid when I was the only woman in a room of men. (I’d thrived on it.) Why did the show speak to me so directly, then? Part of it was her contagious anger. Part was her clarity, her willingness to draw lines where I kept trying to blur them. By the time Gadsby had come out as a lesbian, she pointed out, it was too late, because she was already homophobic, having soaked for so long in the prejudices of her family, her church, and her country—and that’s how I felt, too, about the ideas I’d absorbed about art and genius, the ones that had formed my tastes, invisibly, impossible to see.

  But, really, I think that it was Gadsby’s refusal to charm that appealed to me. I’d spent my life fearing the role of the scold. I wasn’t a stand-up comic, but I had a routine, too. So many of us do. There was a part of me that had always known how to tiptoe, tap-dance, to keep it light—to always calibrate my tone for fear that I would be viewed as a nag. Nanette was a show about the freedom that came from dropping that fear. She made the best case for embracing something a bit better than my inner Norman Mailer.

  She modeled something else, too, even if that was not her intention. As discussion of her work began to spread, Nanette would get labeled many ways: as comedy, as anti-comedy, as a one-woman show. Certainly, it contained an argument for rejecting the art of men who hurt women. But it suggested the opposite approach, as well. Nanette was itself a form of arts criticism, after all—a passionate, informed work of analytical engagement with the art of terrible men. Through her granular, informed analysis of van Gogh and Picasso, Gadsby pushed the audience to see the artists through her eyes. Witchlike, she’d made them into her material rather than letting them turn her into theirs. “Hindsight is a gift,” she chanted at the show’s climax. “So stop wasting my time!” Her peak was now, she insisted. Looking back wasn’t a bad thing. Struggling to see the frame all around you wasn’t wrong. It was the only way to see the world more clearly.

  In October, I saw Gadsby perform at a very different event, at The Wing, a ridiculously swanky all-female work space that served rosé and had a bathroom labeled “No Man’s Land.” She opened with a joke about the fact that, in Nanette, she’d supposedly quit comedy. “I quit in the way that Louis C.K. said he was sorry, in the sense that I didn’t really mean it.” It got a big laugh. It was a clever line—a one-two punch line, a get-out-of-jail pass. That was what I wanted, too. Gadsby was, just at that moment, the hot new thing: She’d even performed at the Emmys. She was familiar enough that a month later, she’d be imitated on Saturday Night Live. Like Louis C.K., she had gotten famous in a way that made her a role model for an audience craving moral guidance. This was, for any artist, at once an opportunity and a risk.

  Louis C.K. was performing again, too, more regularly. Soon, he’d do a seventy-minute set in France, once again the beloved auteur. His new girlfriend was a French stand-up comic. He was applauded on Long Island; he was heckled in Manhattan. During my final edits of this essay, a taped version of one of those Long Island gigs was leaked online. It was bitter, raging material, but also shockingly hacky. He made fun of the Parkland teen activists; he took lazy shots at millennials and made the kind of racist gags Louis had specifically set himself against, not long ago. “What are you going to do, take away my birthday?” he sneered.

  Those of his fans who had clung, despite it all, to some foolish faith, who had believed, perhaps, that Louis C.K. might wait at least a year before starting over—that he’d speak directly into the problem, that he’d own it, somehow, that he’d find a way to make amends, or at least turn the truth into some kind of lacerating art, could see that that wasn’t likely. Instead, the tide was pulling back from the shore. The portal seemed to be closing. Brett Kavanaugh was on the Supreme Court. We’d each have to figure out for ourselves where to draw that ethical line.

  I had visited The Wing that night to look for an ending, but there wasn’t one for me there. It’s hard to find your footing as the ground is shifting. These days, we are all performing what a friend of mine once called “the audit,” struggling to reconcile the stories we used to tell ourselves with the ones we tell ourselves now. The fact that that’s not possible doesn’t make the process any less necessary. Woody Allen, the base coat to my comic sensibility, once wrote that “The wicked at heart probably know something.” Grace Paley, a genius, had a different sort of wisdom: “You write what you don’t know about what you know.”

  HOW JOKES WON THE ELECTION

  How Do You Fight an Enemy Who’s Just Kidding?

  The New Yorker, January 23, 2017

  After Donald Trump was elected president, in 2016, writing felt pointless—let alone writing arts criticism. Finally, at a Tim Hortons, during a Christmas visit to Canada, I managed to hammer out the section of this essay about Trump as a stand-up comic. The one section that I wish I could expand is about the relationship between TV news and TV comedy. Some days, watching Fox, it feels like the key to everything that has gone wrong.

  Since November 8, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump as a reality star (an authentic phony). But what killed me last year were the jokes, because I love jokes—dirty jokes, bad jokes, rude jokes, jokes that cut through bullshit and explode pomposity. Growing up a Jewish kid in the 1970s, in a house full of Holocaust books, giggling at Mel Brooks’s The Producers, I absorbed the impression that jokes, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar, were a machine that killed fascists. Comedy might be cruel or stupid, yet, in aggregate, it was the rebel’s stance. Nazis were humorless. The fact that it was mostly men who got to tell the jokes didn’t bother me. Jokes were a superior way to tell the truth—and that meant freedom for everyone.

  But by 2016 the wheel had spun hard the other way: Now it was the neofascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers had helped put him in office. Online, jokes were powerful accelerants for lies—a tweet was the size of a one-liner, a “dank meme” carried further than any op-ed, and the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for “lulz” had become a blur. Ads looked like news and so did propaganda and so did actual comedy, on both the right and the left—and every combination of the four was labeled “satire.” In a perverse twist, Trump may even have run for president as payback for a comedy routine: President Obama’s lacerating takedown of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. By the campaign’s final days, the race felt driven less by policy disputes than by an ugly war of disinformation, one played for laughs. How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?

  Obama’s act—his public revenge for Trump’s birtherism—was a sophisticated small-club act. It was dry and urbane, performed in the cerebral persona that made Obama a natural fit when he made visits to, say, Marc Maron’s podcast or Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. In contrast, Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He was the insult comic, the stadium act, the ratings-obsessed headliner who shouted down hecklers. His rallies boiled with rage and laughter, which were hard to tell apart. You didn’t have to think that Trump himself was funny to see this effect: I found him repulsive, and yet I could hear those comedy rhythms everywhere, from the Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” routine to the gleeful insult-comic slams of Don Rickles (for “hockey puck,” substitute “Pocahontas”) to Andrew Dice Clay, whose lighten-up-it’s-a-joke, it’s-not-him-it’s-
a-persona brand of misogyny dominated the late 1980s. The eighties were Trump’s era, where he still seemed to live. But he was also reminiscent of the older comics who once roamed the Catskills, those dark and angry men who provided a cathartic outlet for harsh ideas that both broke and reinforced taboos, about the war between men and women, especially. Trump was that hostile-jaunty guy in the big flappy suit, with the vaudeville hair, the pursed lips, and the glare. There’s always been an audience for that guy.

  Like that of any stadium comic, Trump’s brand was control. He was superficially loose, the wild man who might say anything, yet his off-the-cuff monologues were always being tweaked, perfected as he tested catchphrases (“Lock her up!”; “Build the wall!”) for maximum crowd response. On TV and on Twitter, his jokes let him say the unspeakable and get away with it. “I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening—I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he told reporters in July, at the last press conference he gave before he was elected. Then he swept his fat palm back and forth, adding a kicker: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

  It was a classically structured joke. There was a rumor at the time that Russia had hacked the DNC. At the same time, Hillary Clinton’s emails from when she was secretary of state—which were stored on a private server—were under scrutiny. Take two separate stories, then combine them: As any late-night writer knows, that’s the go-to algorithm when you’re on deadline. When asked about the remark on Fox News, Trump said he was being “sarcastic,” which didn’t make sense. His delivery was deadpan, maybe, but not precisely sarcastic.

  But Trump went back and forth this way for months, a joker shrugging off prudes who didn’t get it. He claimed that his imitation of the disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski was a slapstick take on the reporter “groveling because he wrote a good story.” (“Groveling,” like “sarcastic,” felt like the wrong word.) He did it when he said that Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever”—a joke, he insisted, and he actually meant her nose. “I like people who weren’t captured,” about John McCain: That had the shape of a joke, too.

  The Big Lie is a propaganda technique: State false facts so outlandish that they must be true, because who would make up something so crazy? (“I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”) But a joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy. It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast. “Buh-leeve me, buh-leeve me!” Trump said in his act, again and again. Lying about telling the truth is part of the joke. Saying “This really happened!” creates trust between the comic and the people laughing, even if what the audience trusts you to do is to keep on tricking them, like a magician reassuring you that while his other jokes are tricks, this one is magic.

  It could be surprisingly hard to look at the phenomenon of Trump directly; the words bent, the meaning dissolved. You needed a filter. Television was Trump’s natural medium. And television had multiple stories that reflected Trump, or predicted his rise—warped lenses that made it easier to understand the change as it was happening.

  * * *

  —

  No show has been more prescient about how far a joke can go than South Park. Its co-creators, the nimble libertarian tricksters Trey Parker and Matt Stone, could sense a tide of darkness that liberal comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee could not, because South Park liked to ride that wave, too. For two decades, South Park, an adult animated show about dirty-mouthed little boys at a Colorado school, had been the proud “anti-political-correctness” sitcom. Season 19, which came out in 2015, was a meta-meditation on PC, and, by the season’s end, one of the characters, Mr. Garrison, was running for president on a platform of “fucking immigrants to death.” There was also a Canadian president that season, a character who emerged as “this brash asshole who just spoke his mind,” the show explained. “He didn’t really offer any solutions—he just said outrageous things. We thought it was funny. Nobody really thought he’d ever be president. It was a joke! But we just let the joke go on for too long. He kept gaining momentum, and by the time we were all ready to say, ‘Okay, let’s get serious now—who should really be president?’ he was already being sworn into office.”

  Yet, as Season 20 opened, in September 2016, the show was doing precisely what a year earlier it had warned against: treating Garrison’s Trump as an absurd, borderline-sympathetic joke figure, portraying him and Clinton as identical dangers, a choice between a “giant douche” and a “turd sandwich.” Beneath that nihilism, however, South Park was on to something both profound and perverse. The fight between Trump and Clinton, it argued, could not be detached from the explosion of female comedy: It found its roots in everything from the female-cast Ghostbusters reboot to the anti-feminist Gamergate movement. Trump’s call to Make America Great Again was a plea to go back in time, to when people knew how to take a joke. It was an election about who owned the mike.

  In one plot, the father of one of South Park’s little boys is a misogynist troll who gets recruited by a global anonymous online army; in another, the boys and girls at the school split into man-hating feminists and woman-hating “men’s rights” activists. Meanwhile, an addictive snack called Member Berries—they whisper “ ’Member? ’Member?”—fills the white men of the town with longing for the past, mingling Star Wars references with “ ’Member when there weren’t so many Mexicans?” Mr. Garrison, as “Trump,” rides this wave of white male resentment and toxic nostalgia. But the higher he rises, the more disturbed he is by the chaos he’s unleashed. Desperate to lose, he imagines that if he finally offends his followers they won’t vote for him.

  Halfway through the season, Mr. Garrison’s Trump appeared as a stand-up comic. As the crowd chants “Douche! Douche! Douche!” he struts onstage with a microphone, as cocky as Dane Cook. “So, I’m standing in line at the airport, waitin’ in security because of all the freakin’ Muslims,” he begins, and then, when his fans hoot in joy, he tries for something nastier. “And the TSA security people all look like black thugs from the inner city, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, good, you’re gonna protect us?’ ” When racist jokes get only bigger laughs, he switches to gags about sticking his fingers into women’s butts and their “clams.” Finally, some white women walk out. “Where did I lose you, honey?” he taunts them from the stage. “You’ve been okay with the ‘Fuck ’Em All to Death’ and all the Mexican and Muslim shit, but fingers in the ass did it for you. Cool. Just wanted to see where your line was.”

  As prescient as South Park could be, it clearly counted on Clinton’s winning: A dirty boy requires a finger-wagging mom. After Election Day, the writers quickly reworked the show, and the resulting episode, “Oh, Jeez,” exuded numbness and confusion. “We’ve learned that women can be anything, except for president,” one character tells his wife and daughter. There were things South Park always had trouble imagining: It was complex and dialectical about male anger and sadness, and able to gaze with empathy into the soul of a troll, but it couldn’t create a funny girl or a mother who wasn’t a nag. That was the line it couldn’t cross.

  What it did get, however, was how dangerous it could be for voters to feel shamed and censored—and how quickly a liberating joke could corkscrew into a weapon.

  * * *

  —

  In November, shortly after the host of The Apprentice was elected president, the troubled starlet Tila Tequila—herself a former reality-TV star, one whose life had become a sad train wreck—blinked back onto the gossip radar. Now she was a neo-Nazi. On her Twitter account, she posted a selfie from the National Policy Institute conference, an “alt-right” gathering, where she posed, beaming a sweet grin, her arm in a Hitler salute. The caption was a misspelled “sieg heil.” Her bio read “Literally Hitler!”


  It was an image that felt impossible to decode, located outside the sphere of ordinary politics. But Literal Hitler was an inside joke, and it was destabilizing by design; as with any subcultural code, from camp to hip-hop, it was crafted to confuse outsiders. The phrase emerged on Tumblr to mock people who made hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler, often ones about Obama. Then it morphed, as jokes did so quickly last year, into a weapon that might be used to mock any comparisons to Hitler—even when a guy with a serious Hitler vibe ran for president, even when the people using the phrase were cavorting with Nazis. Literal Hitler was one of a thousand such memes, flowing from anonymous Internet boards that were founded a decade ago, a free universe that was crude and funny and juvenile and anarchic by design, a teenage-boy safe space. The original version of this model surfaced in Japan on the “imageboard” 2chan. Then, in 2003, a teenager named Christopher Poole launched 4chan—and when the crudest users got booted they migrated to 8chan, and eventually to Voat.co. For years, those places had mobbed and hacked their ideological enemies, often feminists, but they also competed for the filthiest, most outrageous bit, the champion being whatever might shock an unshockable audience. The only winning move was not to react.