17 responses to “Trump Freaks Out Over Latest SNL Cold Open”

1. 

   CSK

   February 17, 2019 at 2:23 pm

   What do you expect from a man (sort of) who’s still obsessing 30-plus years after the fact that Graydon Carter called him a “short-fingered vulgarian”? Trump is a desperately insecure failed social climber, and we’re all paying the price for that.

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2. 

   Kylopod

   February 17, 2019 at 2:45 pm

   Let’s think a bit about what we’re seeing here. The President of the United States is so upset about a six-minute bit on a late-night Saturday comedy show that he decided to rant and rave about it on Twitter early in the morning.

   His inability to tolerate being the subject of humor may be one of the factors that got us to where we are now. The 2011 White House dinner, when Obama and Seth Meyers literally made fun of Trump to his face, is often cited as a pivotal moment in Trump’s quest for the White House. In the immediate aftermath, of course, he announced he was not running for president that year. It came just after Obama had released his long-form birth certificate and announced the death of Osama Bin Laden–sending Trump’s poll numbers (which initially had placed him at the front of the GOP field) crashing down. But Trump holds grudges forever (he spent decades harassing the humorist who once called him a “short-fingered vulgarian”), and it’s very likely his desire to destroy Obama’s legacy started there.

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3. 

   Just nutha ignint cracker

   February 17, 2019 at 2:50 pm

   Okay. But we’ve always know that Trump was thin-skinned, egomaniacal, a largely inept businessman, and in general a low human being. Most of the MAGAots know all of this, too. The difference is that they DGAF.

   By all means, keep posting these types of stories. They are my only link to SNL, but it might be better to shorten them to mocking the current occupant without the moralizing and conclusioning of things about which there are no virgins in the likely audience. We already got that part.

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4. 

   The abyss that is the soul of cracker

   February 17, 2019 at 2:55 pm

   @Concerned Citizen: But probably won’t be. I could probably write the tweets right now without even knowing what McCabe will say, except that I can spell and know grammar.
5. 

   Slugger

   February 17, 2019 at 4:31 pm

   I do wonder what he means by “retribution”? There are a number of possibilities.
6. 

   CSK

   February 17, 2019 at 4:56 pm

   @Slugger:

   Ah, he’s always fulminating about having the libel laws changed. It makes his base happy.

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7. 

   Mister Bluster

   February 17, 2019 at 5:40 pm

   …what he means by “retribution”?

   He has already advocated for political assassination. What else could he be thinking?

   “I think her bodyguards should drop all weapons. Disarm immediately,” Trump said. “Take their guns away, let’s see what happens to her.”
   “Take their guns away, OK? It’ll be very dangerous,” he added.
   CNN

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8. 

   gVOR08

   February 17, 2019 at 5:45 pm

   Paul Campos at LGM says on this subject,

   It’s impossible to imagine Trump saying something genuinely funny, because genuine wit requires a modicum of various qualities — self-awareness, a sense of the absurd, a sense that other people actually exist, an ability to imagine that there are interesting things in the world other than oneself etc. — that Trump lacks in profound ways.

   It’s something of a truism that conservatives don’t do humor. Lindsay Graham (who may be faking conservative) used to occasionally show a genuine sense of humor. Can you name two other conservative Republican pols who can do humor?

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9. 

   MarkedMan

   February 17, 2019 at 5:49 pm

   It’s no wonder our resident Trumpers are so quiet nowadays. (Don’t confuse Trumpers with a traditional troll, who only wants to goad people into a reaction and doesn’t care in the least about the actual content of the posts.) Added to this: it turns out Trump officials reached out to the Japanese Prime Minister and begged him to nominate Donny-boy for a Nobel Prize. Which he did, and then immediately leaked that he had only done it upon request. Talk about a pity f*ck…

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10. 

    MarkedMan

    February 17, 2019 at 6:10 pm

    @gVOR08:

    It’s something of a truism that conservatives don’t do humor. Lindsay Graham (who may be faking conservative) used to occasionally show a genuine sense of humor.

    If Graham is faking being a conservative he’s doing a pretty dang convincing job. And, although he hasn’t said anything funny in a while, he has had some Barney Frank level zingers in his time. Conservatives can absolutely do humor. But small, petty, angry people cannot.

    I think the reason it’s become a truism that conservatives can’t do humor is because the type of people that call themselves conservatives nowadays tend towards the small, petty and angry. To be funny you have to be willing to laugh at yourself as well as others. And to be really funny in anything other than a standup environment you have to be willing to let someone else get the laugh. Are there conservatives who can be funny? Absolutely. Tom Selleck comes to mind. Mel Gibson. Roseanne Barr (ok, sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal, sometimes just frickin’ nuts). But people who wear their conservative credentials on their sleeves? Could you imagine Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity making a joke at their own expense? And in political humor, you earn the right to mock the opposition by being willing to mock your own. Every liberal late night host has done an Obama imitation, or a Hillary or Bill Clinton one. Can you even conceive of the modern conservative “intelligentsia” mocking Trump? Much less Reagan? Seth Meyers has a segment called something like “Seth Can’t Say That!” where he brings out two of his writers, one a black woman and the other a lesbian, and they tell jokes that Seth can’t. Half of them are at the expense of whites or men or conservatives, and the other half are good natured joshes of black and lesbian culture. Could you conceive of a modern self declared conservative making even a good natured josh of say, the anti-abortion movement? Or the tea party? These are petty and small people with little confidence.

    But the bloggers here would also call themselves conservatives, and while this isn’t really the forum for it, I could easily see them being self deprecating in another context.

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11. 

    Gustopher

    February 17, 2019 at 6:18 pm

    @gVOR08: Humor generally requires transgressing boundaries, or inverting rules and expectations. Genuine conservatives have tighter boundaries and so their humor isn’t going to be funny to the more liberal mainstream. Genuine conservatives probably thought Hee-Haw was hysterical.

    Modern “conservatives” mostly just spend their time punching down and going “hurr, hurr, good one Cletus”.

    A Mormon coworker of mine, funny guy, used to (also) tell jokes about Juggalos. His other stuff was better. Anyway, one day at lunch he explained that he had made a joke over the weekend and his wife responded with “why would gigolos do that?” and he realized that she had been thinking he had been making gigolo jokes for years. He regretted that his first instinct was to correct her.
12. 

    Kylopod

    February 17, 2019 at 6:45 pm

    @MarkedMan: I’ve mentioned it here before, but the first time I truly started to understand the nature of conservative “humor” came from reading a Baltimore sun article in 2004.

    “Not all comedians are angry, bomb-throwing, left-wing types, like Moore, Bill Maher or Janeane Garofalo,” he says. “That’s a myth. Lots of intelligent, educated Americans respect President Bush as a man of strong values and above-average smarts who has dedicated himself to protecting them.

    “And what’s funnier, anyway, than [Democratic presidential candidate] John Kerry saying, in that self-important voice, ‘I voted for the $87 billion [in support of the Iraq war] before I voted against it?’ Liberals are hilarious. Sometimes they just skewer themselves. You don’t have to write their material.”

    Peterkofsky speaks with the rapid-fire delivery of a stand-up comic and has a jokester’s knack for turning a phrase. For example: “Liberals don’t let the facts interfere with a good emotion, while conservatives don’t let emotions interfere with the facts.” ….

    “People have been brainwashed to think conservatives can’t be funny,” says Gorin, who has always felt like a contradiction in terms…. She made a name for herself in the Journal not long after Bill Clinton left office. When the ex-president’s dog was run over and killed outside his Chappaqua, N.Y., home, Gorin’s piece, “Buddy’s Dead; Is Anyone Surprised?” outraged Clinton supporters.

    It’s pretty clear when you read this that these two so-called comedians are brimming with so much contempt for liberals you can practically see the spittle dripping from their jaws. What they’re doing is essentially the Rush Limbaugh playbook: use their stale talking points and narrow stereotypes to turn liberals into such cartoons they become ridiculous. It’s hatred disguised as humor, and has a much closer relationship to schoolyard taunts than to grownup comedy. It also happens to be the overwhelmingly predominant form of “humor” found on the right, to this day.

    One thing I find very telling is that conservatives often seem to have a poor understanding of the very categories of humor. Ann Coulter has been defended as a “satirist.” When Trump warned during the campaign about “Second Amendment people” if he lost, his remark was later described as “sarcastic.” Neither of those characterizations make any sense, and seem fundamentally to be category errors by people who have no idea what satire or sarcasm actually are beyond mechanisms that aren’t meant to be taken 100% literally. I do think Coulter (and Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, and a number of the other talk-radio hosts) do engage in something that could be described as a form of insult comedy–but Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield they ain’t.

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13. 

    Just nutha ignint cracker

    February 17, 2019 at 6:54 pm

    @Gustopher: Still do. My former apartment mate binge watches Hee Haw on YouTube.
14. 

    Kathy

    February 17, 2019 at 8:43 pm

    @Slugger:

    I assume he means in a “strong” country, people who make fun of Dear leader would be sent to a gulag.
15. 

    Pylon

    February 17, 2019 at 8:58 pm

    Even Nixon appeared on Laugh In. Trump has less character than Tricky Dick.

    On comedians, I can’t think of a RW comedian I think is funny. There are comic actors who are RW, but their laughs are scripted. Roseanne BTW, was not funny as a standup IMO. Dennis Miller’s routine is painful.

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16. 

    DrDaveT

    February 18, 2019 at 11:42 am

    @Kylopod:

    “Liberals don’t let the facts interfere with a good emotion, while conservatives don’t let emotions interfere with the facts.”

    To me, the ironic part is that this caricature really was funny — 50 years ago. By 2004, though, it was just Newspeak. It turned out that conservative devotion to facts was contingent on the facts favoring the policies they wanted…

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17. 

    Kylopod

    February 18, 2019 at 1:06 pm

    @DrDaveT: The absurdity of that line is revealed by what he says in the very first paragraph from that excerpt: “Lots of intelligent, educated Americans respect President Bush as a man of strong values and above-average smarts who has dedicated himself to protecting them.”

    That’s a pretty weird thing to say in a discussion about conservative comedy. You wouldn’t expect a liberal comedian to open a discussion of their field by gushing over Obama–not because liberal comedians didn’t like Obama, but because that isn’t a source of comedy. “Obama/Bush is a great president,” agree or disagree, isn’t funny. Humor comes from conflict, from commenting on how things aren’t the way they ought to be.

    The part about Bush having “above-average smarts” is especially a strange thing to say in this context, because it doesn’t sound like much of a compliment (talk about damning with faint praise)–except it’s clearly meant to contradict the liberal comedians who depicted Bush as a moron. So it’s basically the Bush-era equivalent of “very stable genius.” What’s really underlying all this is the stew of conservative resentment, jealousy, and pathological obsession with putting liberals in their place. You can almost hear the “So there!” in his remarks: “I can make a funny too. So there! Bush is a smart guy. So there!” That’s why the line about conservatives not letting emotions interfere with facts comes off so tone-deaf; it is so obviously spoken by someone who doesn’t realize he’s consumed by emotion–bitter, negative emotion. Which might be a potential source of humor if he had an ounce of self-awareness.

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