Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  On the day of the shoot, the Funny or Die crew set up in the Diplomatic Room, a reception room on the ground floor of the White House. Their greenroom was the adjacent Map Room, its walls covered with marked-up maps from historic military campaigns. They were told they would only have the president for fifty minutes, so the crew prepped everything they could, then waited. And waited. They grabbed lunch with White House staffers and even bowled a few frames in the Truman Bowling Alley. The president was running late. Galifianakis kept sitting on antique chairs in the Map Room and getting scolded by a guard—“but then he would never give us chairs,” Aukerman remembered.

  Finally Obama appeared, and everyone, staffers and video crew alike, snapped noticeably to attention. He greeted Galifianakis and they started chatting about actor Bradley Cooper, the mutual acquaintance who had helped Funny or Die get their foot in the door with the administration. But by now time was even more limited. “The president is a one-and-done guy,” an aide told Aukerman. “He’s only going to do one take.”

  “What if I’d like him to do another?”

  “Why would you want him to do another take?” replied the aide, genuinely confused and a little unnerved by the idea of a comedian giving direction to the most powerful man on earth.

  “Oh, if I just want a different read or something.”

  “Why would he need to read something differently?”

  Aukerman realized he wasn’t speaking the right language. “What if he gets a fact wrong?”

  This finally got through. “Oh, something like that, okay. Tell you what: the president looks to me to get him out of situations. If you need to do another take, look to me, give me a sign, and I’ll give the nod to the president to let him know it’s okay. If you really, really feel like you need one.”

  Two minutes into the first take, the crew was told they only had fifteen minutes left, much less than the hour they were promised. “I could see the video, the chances of it being good, disappearing before our very eyes,” Aukerman said. The first take wasn’t going well, largely due to Galifianakis’s evident nervousness at having to repeatedly insult and annoy the president of the United States just a few hundred feet from the Oval Office. But about halfway through something changed. The interview started clicking. Galifianakis and Obama had loosened up and were trading jokes, improvising around the outline. Aukerman began wondering if there was any way to save the unfunny first half in the editing room, and when the cameras cut, he immediately looked for the aide who was supposed to be his advocate with the president.

  But before he could make eye contact, Obama turned to Aukerman. “Well, what do you think?”

  Despite strict warnings not to do precisely this, Aukerman screwed up his courage. “Well, Mr. President, to be honest, halfway through it got so good and really loosened up. I wish we could do the first half with that kind of fun and energy, but I’m told that you have to go.”

  “Let’s do it again,” Obama told the room.

  “Instinctively, I think he knew when it got good,” Aukerman remembered. “He stopped [the second take]. He went, ‘That was it, right?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, actually that was the moment when it got really good.’ ” The president went around the room thanking everyone—“even the twenty-two-year-old weird bearded cameraman from Funny or Die”—and that was a wrap.

  Aukerman and Galifianakis couldn’t believe what they’d gotten away with. That night at an after-party, a staffer congratulated them on how well the sketch had gone, but added, “Well, we’re going to want to cut it down so the Obamacare stuff is the majority of it.” That sent them into another panicky tailspin, but a few weeks later when Aukerman sent his edit to the White House, complete with all the testy sparring and awkward silences and side-eye of a regular episode of Between Two Ferns, it was a big hit. The administration’s only request: add one cutaway to Obama smiling, so it’s clear he’s in on the joke and having fun. Except for that, the only question was, “When do we put it out?”

  The video went live on Funny or Die just two weeks later. It was viewed twelve million times on its first day, and became the number one referrer to the Obamacare website. Health secretary Kathleen Sebelius called it “the Galifianakis bump.” But to Aukerman, the real point of pride had nothing to do with the uninsured. It was that the video had turned out funny—and not “funny” like you usually get from Washington, warmed-over Bob Hope stuff, but the real deal. Comedians were calling and texting him nonstop congratulating him on the coup. He couldn’t figure out why the White House had trusted them, but he knew the video wouldn’t have moved the needle for Obamacare otherwise. “I don’t know what it was, but it was absolutely the only way to do that kind of thing. Because people can smell when something is inauthentic and when someone is just trying to curry favor with young people.”

  One of the interminable string of Republican primary debates had begun on the TV in the corner while Aukerman was telling me the story. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz were sniping at the long-shot candidate, Donald Trump, in broken closed-captioning.

  “Look,” I said. “You’re framing this as a subversive thing that you guys got away with, but in five years, if President Rubio wanted to do Between Two Ferns promoting, like, a tax cut for the rich, or tightening immigration, you wouldn’t be like, ‘Okay, let’s do a funny video about deportation,’ right? As a comedian, are you worried that the powers that be have figured out that they need to have comedy working for them?”

  “We’ve been asked to do—well, for instance, say Dick Cheney wanted to do Between Two Ferns. Our idea if Dick Cheney were to do it was to just drop all jokes and start grilling him on why he’s a war criminal. That would have been funny to us.”

  “How hypothetical is this Cheney example?”

  A long pause. “I don’t know. Can’t say.”

  Trump was speaking silently now in close-up, the captioning barely able to keep up with his run-on sentences. “I do think that you could do something with Trump,” Aukerman mused. “Trump is a magnetic dude. You could do a viral video with Trump and have it be funny.”

  I was absolutely certain that no viral video could get Donald Trump, of all people, elected president, and said so. But Aukerman had had this conversation before. Back in 1999, he said, his Mr. Show castmates Bob Odenkirk and David Cross were both convinced that George W. Bush would never be president and laughed at Aukerman’s theory that nowadays, name recognition and celebrity were enough to put someone in the White House. “But that’s what happened. He was famous enough.

  “The best advertisement for Trump’s campaign is Celebrity Apprentice, where he’s never talking about politics. Today any reality star could make a go of it.”

  Trump and Jeb Bush were in split-screen now, talking over the top of each other. They were the two candidates most likely to get a head start from name recognition, but onscreen their demeanors couldn’t have been more different. Bush was staring blankly ahead with his shoulders slumped and his mouth a hard little hyphen, as if he’d rather have been anywhere else. Trump, by contrast, was a cartoon character, grinning and mugging and gesturing with his arms so widely that his half of the screen couldn’t even hold him. He seemed like a force of pure television energy too big, too intense, to be contained.

  President Wrestlemania

  There are hundreds of narratives to explain Donald Trump’s shocking rise to the presidency in 2016, and because voting blocs are not monolithic, most of them are true in one way or another. Automation and outsourcing had been catastrophic for working-class Americans, who were largely left behind by the Obama-era recovery. The Democratic Party had passed up their chance to become the champions of economic equality and fell back again on the centrist strategies of the Clinton era. If that wasn’t enough to depress turnout, Republican efforts to make voting more difficult had succeeded in many states following a Supreme Court decision weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hillary Clinton ran against unfavorability numbers unmatched for any presidential candida
te in history aside from her opponent, and her campaign mistakenly believed they could win in a landslide by playing defense. Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee, and the director of the FBI announced new evidence in the recently closed investigation of Clinton’s e-mails just two weeks before the election, contributing to an unprecedentedly late swing in the polls. The Electoral College neutered millions of Democratic voters in safe coastal states and placed the presidency in the hands of, as it turned out, eighty thousand Rust Belt voters. The rise of the Internet and the declining influence of the media establishment made it easy for voters to find stories that matched their political convictions, whether they were true or not. And it turned out that, deep down, a depressingly large number of white voters were looking for a forceful figure to tell them exactly what to do, that they weren’t powerless, that there was someone else they could blame for many of their problems.

  It’s all true. But it’s also a fact that none of that would have been sufficient for most outsider candidates. (George Wallace, the previous high-water mark for this sort of thing, managed 13.5 percent of the popular vote in 1968.) The secret to Donald Trump’s success—and no one likes to say this about a blustering racist demagogue—is that he was so entertaining. He was, to his audience, funny.

  By some accounts, Donald Trump’s serious presidential ambitions were born out of a comedy routine. At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama began his after-dinner speech with a solid four and a half minutes of jokes about “birther” conspiracy theories questioning his citizenship, of which Donald Trump had been a loud and recalcitrant champion. Then, after a run of jokes on other media and political subjects, Obama returned to his muse. “Donald Trump is here tonight!” he announced, to delighted whoops from the crowd, and dove into another two minutes of jokes about Celebrity Apprentice, each one twisting the knife a little more as he painted Trump as a buffoon and a lightweight, whose reality TV decisions—like whether he should “fire” Meat Loaf or Gary Busey—had nothing in common with the rigors of the presidency. (Those rigors were not hypothetical for Obama that night. He had given the order to raid Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound the day before, though no one would know about the operation until the following night.) These jokes were too pointed to be mere potshots at a target-rich environment. Trump’s embrace of the racism at the core of the birther movement had clearly irked Obama.

  Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker, sitting a few tables away from Trump, watched his reaction closely. “Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him.” Instead of displaying “that thick-skinned cheerfulness that almost all American public people learn, however painfully, to cultivate,” Trump “sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage.” Could that rage have fueled him for the next five years? Gopnik wondered in hindsight.

  Working crowds on the campaign trail, Trump’s style couldn’t have been further from Obama’s bone-dry alt-comedy sensibility at a Washington black-tie dinner. But there was no mistaking the showmanship: Trump would bluster like a pro wrestler, free-associate insults about his opponents as the crowd whooped him on, punctuate his speeches with cartoonishly broad sneers and scowls and snorts of disbelief. Other Republican candidates figuratively wrapped themselves in the flag; Trump would do it literally, always getting big laughs and cheers when he’d come to the side of the stage to lovingly cradle Old Glory in his arms, like a drunken boss sneaking off to give his secretary a squeeze at an office Christmas party. The New York Times noted that crowds leaving Trump rallies would often praise their candidate in the language of comedy fans who’d just seen a favorite rage comedian do a blistering hour-long set. Their man wasn’t “politically correct”—he said what we’re all thinking. He wasn’t afraid to “go there.”

  And as much as he drew on his supporters’ energy, leaning hard on big applause lines—Build that wall! Drain the swamp! Hillary has to go to jail!—he clearly wasn’t just in it to win their love. Trump’s inner comedian would sometimes push back against the crowd, unable to resist a good punch line. In August 2016, at a rally in Virginia, Trump heard a baby crying in the audience. “I love babies. I hear that baby cry, I like it,” he gushed to the crowd with his trademark logorrhea. “What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around—like, don’t worry about it, you know? It’s young and beautiful and healthy and that’s what we want.” But just a minute or two later, as Trump was inveighing against China, the baby started crying again. “Actually I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here,” Trump said. “I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking. That’s okay. People don’t understand. That’s okay.” Banning babies on the campaign trail rather than kissing them was a new move in American politics, and the media reported it as another in a series of Trump’s bizarre and erratic “gaffes.” Virginia governor Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, even defended the baby on Twitter. But any comedian watching the video would see it immediately: Trump didn’t really care that much about the crying baby. What he liked was the abrupt sitcom turn of unexpectedly zinging the crying baby. He was doing a bit, seeing how far the crowd would go with him.

  Softening the Blowhard

  Was Hitler funny in front of a crowd? You sure don’t get that impression from newsreel clips, where he always looks so stiff and angry (although Heinrich Mann called him “the Austrian comedian” and the British fascist Diana Mitford, when asked what she remembered about Hitler, once replied, “The laughs,” so who knows?). But Trump’s charisma was different. The clowning and on-camera ease were the great levelers that, against all odds, convinced millions of people that a Manhattan landlord billionaire was one of them, a champion of the working family.

  Let me be clear: the xenophobia and the racism were also part of Trump’s appeal to big swaths of his base. But Trump’s over-the-top comic persona seems to have helped him there as well. In a 2008 experiment, political scientists assigned one group of college students to watch clips from The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s mock-conservative comedy talk show, while another group watched commentary on the same subject from actual cable blowhard Bill O’Reilly, the target of much of Colbert’s satire. Surprisingly, the group that had watched Colbert’s sly left-leaning satire—even knowing it was satire—afterward reported more support for President Bush, congressional Republicans, and Republican policies on the economy and terrorism than the group that had watched O’Reilly! And, despite the fact that these were fairly politically savvy undergraduates, the ones who watched the Colbert Report clips said that they felt less confidence in their ability to understand issues. The extra level of distancing in Colbert’s satire had been more confusing, perhaps, than intended. In other words, the study’s authors concluded, political messaging (in this case, conservative messaging) is more convincing when couched in humor than otherwise. In Trump’s case, the extra level of distancing was perfect for undecided voters who wanted to believe in the candidate. It enabled them to claim, as I once heard a Trump supporter say in a radio interview, “He doesn’t mean half the things people think he means.” Anything indefensible he said about the (choose one: wall with Mexico, Muslim ban, legality of torture, Chinese global-warming hoax, prosecutions for journalists, and so on ad infinitum) could be met with a dismissive “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump!”

  At the same time, Trump’s goofy showmanship also kept his opponents from taking his campaign seriously until it was too late. The media narrative could always be, “Can you believe how crazy this is? No, really, Donald Trump!” instead of truly grappling with the ugly looming possibility of an actual Trump presidency, even after he won the Republican nomination and was running competitively in swing-state polls. To some voters, especially young ones disillusioned by Bernie Sanders’s hard-fought prim
ary loss, the idea of President Donald J. Trump seemed like a fitting capstone for our age of irony, the perfect middle-finger punch line, rather than a real threat. In the days following the election, an MSNBC clip making the rounds online showed reporter Chris Jansing on Election Day at a polling precinct in Cleveland, in a county Obama had won by forty points. A young black voter at a table behind her turns around to peek at the camera, then slyly lifts up his hoodie to show off a red “Make America Great Again” cap, which he points at, grinning. It’s a telling clip: the kind of voter Democrats largely took for granted, enjoying the transgressive comic thrill of voting for—can you believe it?—Donald Trump from The Apprentice!

  Send in the Clowns

  “Everything is changing in America,” Will Rogers prophesied almost a century ago. “People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.” And it literally came true: a third of Americans—and 46 percent of young voters—report that their vote is informed by what they learn on comedy shows like Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show. On the other side of the age and ideology gap are twenty-four-hour cable news and talk radio, which may not have as sharp a comic voice but are still fundamentally news-as-entertainment. We created a culture where politics and political commentary are expected to be funny, sometimes above all else. We can’t pretend to be surprised when that system produces winners who are entertaining but otherwise completely unqualified to govern.

  It’s not comedy’s fault, but there’s no getting around it: comedians are among those who taught us that saying anything we’re thinking is an absolute good, as long as it gets a laugh. Audience reaction is the only measure of success. (Think about it: a drama can move or affect you in a hundred different ways, but comedy only has to make you laugh.)XII Trump was the clickbait candidate, the one who learned first that attention and celebrity weren’t just a plus in an election, they were enough by themselves to assure a win. It didn’t matter if the headline matched the story. It didn’t matter if the facts were accurate, or even internally consistent. You just needed the reaction, more laughs than the other candidate, more eyeballs than the other candidate. It was painful to watch his political rivals come to the same realization: Marco Rubio stumbling through jokes about Trump’s “spray tan” and small penis,XIII Hillary Clinton tweeting out memes and dabbing with Ellen DeGeneres. But it was too late.