The Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre, has been flirting with the Canadian equivalent of MAGAworld for some time now. He showed a bit of leg when he had his picture taken with the Trucker Convoy that occupied Ottawa in 2022. He batted his eyelashes at Warrant Officer James Topp in June that year, joining him and others in a “march for freedom.” (Topp’s a libertarian anti-vaxxer, court martialed for his resistance to the vaccination policies of the Canadian armed forces.) And on he goes: a coy peek over the shoulder at the vile American conspiracist Alex Jones, who said he’s been ”following this guy for years and he’s the real deal” (a comment whose implications seem sinister); murmuring sweet nothings when the Truckers reappeared this spring, egging them on with easy-to-chant, if less easy to parse, three-word catchphrases: “Axe the Tax,” “Spike the Hike,” and “Bring It Home.”
The latter phrase evokes for Poilievre the imaginary past that Trump promises to reinstate. “It means bringing home the country we always knew and still love,” Poilievre told supporters in Toronto a few weeks ago. Life under the Conservatives, he assured them, will see …
Children skipping to school without fearing for their safety. Seniors waving at friendly shopkeepers. Parents calling their road-hockey-playing kids to bed. A young couple sitting on the porch, “soaking in the warm evening air, with a Canadian flag gently hanging from the front of their brand new home.”
Poilievre’s concluding words, according to the reporter who recorded them, were drowned out by his fans’ ecstatic cheers.
His reference to road hockey and the Canadian flag signal a nuanced distinction between Poilievre’s vision for Canada and Trump’s promise of an America Made Great Again. However, the means by which the two leaders hope to achieve their visions are much the same. Both involve the wooing of fascists, fantasists and conspiracists, even as they claim to put distance between them. There’s one small, or not so small, thing that sets them apart: Poilievre isn’t nearly as funny as Trump. The Canadian is an effective speaker. Trump, as they say, kills.
Trump’s mastery of a particular brand of comedy is so obvious an aspect of his persona, an element so central to his campaigning style, that it’s worth digging into. Why is he so funny? Why does his humor appeal to so many? And, of possible importance to Canadians, is it a transferable skill?
What’s So Funny?
A number of writers have taken a run at this. Dale Beran, who more than a decade ago immersed himself in the twilit world of online chat rooms, described a lineage that began with a site called Something Awful, a sort of online club where anonymous boys shared crude jokes, crass put-downs and pornography. The site was roughly moderated, however, leading many of its participants to migrate to the less restrictive 2-chan and thence, in time, to the wholly unrestricted 4chan, where, in effect, everything was allowed. What they produced was garbage but that was the point. It was through these media that two new terms gained currency. Those who made cruel fun of others for the amusement of all were trolls, and the mechanism of their mockery was often a meme. Both trolls and memes were picked up by others in other corners of the web, notably by actual Nazis and racists, whose themes the kids had dabbled in without meaning it. For the kids it was all a joke, but not a joke. Adolescent boys in pretended rebellion against their parents and the adult world. Some readers may remember Pepe the Frog, a fascist meme which Trump and his supporters adopted, seriously, not seriously. If you didn’t get the joke, you were either a dad, or a Lib.
New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik suggests another precursor of Trump’s brand of humor: the insult comic, a type he associates with Sam Kinison and makes me think of Don Rickles. In either case, the comic makes sometimes quite vicious fun of a celebrity, but always with a sly smile, a smile that implies that he both means it and doesn’t. Trump is a brilliant contriver of personal insults. As many others have noted, he consistently comes up with damaging labels that stick: “Sleepy Joe,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Crazy Liz,” Ron DeSanctimonious,” “Cryin’ Chuck,” and “Phony Fani,” not to mention “Lyin’ Ted Cruz.” Of course, unlike the comics, Trump means it. His insults are nasty, aimed at his enemies, and meant to wound. He gets away with it because his audience sees it as a familiar brand of comedy and also because they believe there’s something in what he says. They may (or may not) admit that he exaggerates, that he gets carried away. Gopnik says he’s heard something like this from Trump’s rich backers: “Oh, he’s a clown. He goes too far. But he’s not wrong about A, B, and C, right? He’s not wrong about immigration. He’s not wrong about the woke right.” So Trump gives licence to those of his supporters who share his prejudices, inviting them vent their inchoate rage, while giving cover to his more sophisticated sponsors, who need him for tax breaks and deregulation, and think they can control him. Gopnik, who sees parallels in Trump’s career trajectory to that of Hitler, is not so sure.
The brilliant Irish journalist, Fintan O’Toole, doesn’t regard Trump as a Nazi, but he too sees parallels with Hitler’s rise. He quotes two men who witnessed Hitler’s rallies and described the participants as a “collective of kindred spirits”: “Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering the scorn.”
O’Toole observes that:
… it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his [Trump’s] campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear and resentment entertaining.
What sets Trump apart, as O’Toole sees it, is his unself-conscious self-awareness: he knows he’s seen as a huckster and a fraud – he suffered for years the contempt of the New York elite whose ranks he longed to join – but then he found it expedient to accept and even revel in the role. O’Toole points to Trump’s appearance at the 2005 Emmy Awards ceremony as pivotal, the point at which he cemented his evolved public persona. On stage at the Emmys, dressed in a straw hat and overalls and carrying a pitchfork, he sang (badly) the theme song from the television series Green Acres. He was impersonating the lead character, a wealthy banker who gave up a luxurious life in Manhattan for a simpler existence as a farmer in Hooterville. It was funny in part because it was impossible to imagine Trump making such a choice. But there was more to it than that: “Whoever had the idea of connecting Trump back to Green Acres,” O’Toole writes,
clearly understood that “Donald Trump” had by then also become a metatelevision character, a real-life failed businessman who impersonated an ultrasuccessful mogul on The Apprentice. And Trump went along with the conceit because he instinctively understood that self-parody was not a threat to his image – it was his image.
He was both that person and not that person, a rich man and an entertainer, a mogul and a fraud. The ambiguity made him slippery. The media found it hard to take him seriously. They still do.
Is Trumpism Transferable?
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, tried to do Trumpism seriously, without the flimflam and theatrics, and definitely without the humor. He failed. Pierre Poilievre appears to be trying it too. He can’t do comedy the way Trump does, and his anger is more calculated than sincere. He has been working to become more relatable. He smiles a lot. Whether any of this will work remains to be seen. In any case, Trudeau is more likely to be defeated by the public’s desire for change than by Poilievre’s weak-tea version of Trumpism. Trudeau’s been prime minister for almost a decade and in politics, that’s as much time as you’re likely to get.
But maybe the lesson lies not in Trump’s comedy, which is pretty much immune to imitation. Maybe it’s a distraction. Never mind the jokes, whether they’re serious or not. Never mind the vicious jibes. Trump may or may not be a fascist but fascism is what we should be worrying about. It’s his friends and enablers we should be watching. Poilievre’s too - the people to whom he’s flashing a bit of leg. If fascism comes, it will come under cover, hidden behind the miasma of jokes and memes and courtroom antics. If it comes, it will come to America before Canada. We can be slow in the uptake. But we generally get where America lands in the end.
Sources: “Poilievre’s Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally Draws Big Crowd,” EnergyNow Media, March 12, 2024; Dale Beran, It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office (NY: All Points Books, 2019); The Political Scene (Podcast) The New Yorker: Adam Gopnik on Hitler’s Rise to Power, March 25, 2024. Adam Gopnik, “The Enablers: Hitler Didn’t Grab Power, He Was Given It,” The New Yorker, March 25, 2024, pp. 72-76. (Reviewing Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power (NY: Knopf); Fintan O’Toole, “Laugh Riot,” New York Review of Books, March 21, 2024, pp. 51-54.
I really enjoyed reading that. So I’m very solid insights especially the comment with regards to Trudeau being defeated because like cold toast, he’s not the flavour people imagined.
Damn! This is original, insightful, and well-written. Jonathan, keep on rocking!