Is It Time for Us to Stop Making Politics Funny?

I distinctly remember in the days following Election Night 2016 that there were people around me pondering "I wonder what Saturday Night Live is going to do with this?"  It was a decent question.  For decades, from Chevy Chase's clumsy Gerald Ford to Darrell Hammond's lecherous Bill Clinton to Tina Fey's foolish Sarah Palin, the show had become one of the first voices in American politics.  All of the 2016 election, the show had been quick to mock Donald Trump and his chances, hiring veteran actor Alec Baldwin to play the part, a "temporary" cast member on the series because series regular Kate McKinnon would be playing the actual president.  Lin-Manuel Miranda even wrapped "never gonna be president" about Trump weeks before the election.  And of course, the show did acknowledge this, both with an opening number by Kate McKinnon and later in a sketch starring Chris Rock & Dave Chapelle.  

But I...couldn't watch it.  For someone who had viewed with great relish in the past, I couldn't stomach it.  Politics was no longer funny, and in the five years since then, I've struggled to find a footing to recapture my sense before November 8th.  People regularly mocked Trump during his presidency, and he did indeed do foolish & stupid things throughout his one term in office.  His administration was filled with characters that were mockable-Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Mike Pompeo (when Rick Perry is one of your more competent cabinet secretaries, you're making a mistake somewhere).  His press secretaries were a cascade of absurd jokes, and don't get me started on his adult children, all clamoring for a throne they'd never win (and their dad's love, even more elusive).  But I never found it funny.  And though Joe Biden is now president, Trump still a threat but not an omnipresent one, I can't find politics funny.

This became more striking in the past year because as a nation the United States has long struggled with serious issues if we cannot inject some sort of humor into them.  American comedy is supposed to be edgy, it's supposed to be boundary-pushing, it's supposed to be radical & shock & bring change.  But it's also got a time & place.  And I think that time & place might've been passed, because I don't think that we know how to handle present-day politics well enough to treat it so cavalierly.

This is best illustrated with the Covid-19 response and the antivaxxer movement.  It has become a common pastime in liberal or progressive circles (whether they be dinner parties, online communities, or cable news) to treat antivaxxers as an idiotic sideshow, a funny joke that we can mock in between our congratulatory reminders that we've already gotten the vaccine & are therefore much less likely to die from the disease.  But that's not helping-the antivaxxer movement is a genuine, constant threat to the world-it is literally killing thousands of people a day.  There's nothing funny about it, no matter how many well-meaning skits or newspaper cartoons you share on social media, and it's also clear that humor isn't helping the situation.

I think the answer here doesn't lie in trying to make the antivaxxer movement feel in on the joke by having them played by celebrities on major sketch programs or late night shows.  I think it's by telling them they are a threat to the American populace and the American way of life.  Yes, they have a choice to be made, but having them played by Kenan Thompson or Aidy Bryant isn't underlining the seriousness of this-I think it's time America approach some of the issues that it needs to deal with without the crutch of comedy.  We need to say "this is a serious conversation, this is not a joke, and we are not going to give you the refuge of brushing it off."  

Antivaxxers are killing not just themselves, but also others around them.  Breakthrough cases are less likely to result in hospitalization or death-they aren't universally not resulting in severe cases (but they are considerably more likely to help prevent hospitalization or death, so get your damn vaccine if you haven't).  But they also take up space in our hospitals, depriving people who might need ICU beds due to heart attacks, cancer, respiratory illnesses, or accidents from getting the medical care they need.  They overtax a medical system that we treat like a piggybank, forgetting that doctors and nurses and specialists are humans, and we're basically treating them like machines that don't have limits.  They are prolonging a pandemic that exacerbated a mental health crisis in this country (that we've already ignored).  They are preventing our children (many of whom cannot safely get vaccinated yet) from being able to safely go to school.  They are also costing countless amounts of money, bankrupting businesses & entire industries, wrecking havoc on the economy that may never recover.  And they are taking away precious political resources & focus that should be going to a country that is already on the brink, with climate change, gun violence, & racial inequality causing daily disturbances to our lives.

This isn't acceptable, and it isn't right, and I'm tired of it.  I don't have all of the answers here-I don't know the perfect solution here.  I don't know what to do with the belief I have at this point that antivaxxers are genuinely bad people, not just people who do bad things, but are genuinely just bad people who don't care about the world around them.  But I do know that this conversation doesn't get better by adding a comedic element to the conversation.  Bo Burnham in his brilliant special Inside earlier this year asked "are you really joking at a time like this...is comedy over?"  I think it's time for us to have the discussion of whether comedy has a place in politics, not because it's not something we can't do (freedom of speech is sacred), but whether political comedy is causing more problems than helping.