Transcript
Speaker: Thank you again for joining us.
Speaker: We're really excited that Dr. Chris Gilbert is with us to talk a little bit about some of the power of humor and what we can learn from talking about humor.
Speaker: This, for those of you who don't know, is sponsored by the CARP Research Lab.
Speaker: And we're a loose collection of international and interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in studying character and character assassination in politics, science, and entertainment.
Speaker: And our home disciplines span things like psychology, history, rhetoric, communication and media, and all sorts of things.
Speaker: As a loose collection of scholars, we host conferences dedicated to the subject, or we will, again, once we're allowed to safely gather.
Speaker: We publish scholarship, which is one of the things we're here to talk about today, and we teach courses, workshops, and seminars on building character and character assassination.
Speaker: I'm Jennifer Kohane.
Speaker: I'm an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore and my home discipline is rhetoric as is the discipline of our guest speaker today.
Speaker: I've been one of the founding members of the CARP Research Lab since we officially sort of created ourselves in 2016.
Speaker: Dr. Gilbert is a contributor to the Rutledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management, which is the first comprehensive look at character assassination as a phenomenon.
Speaker: And this handbook spans all sorts of geographic locations and historical eras to really help us learn about character assassination.
Speaker: This book was released in January of 2020.
Speaker: I wish I could hold up a physical copy of it for you to see, but alas, I left mine in my office, which I'm not allowed to go to.
Speaker: Dr. Gilbert is an assistant professor at Assumption College in Massachusetts.
Speaker: He received his PhD in Communication and Culture at Indiana University, one of the flagship land-grant universities in the Midwest known for studying rhetoric
Speaker: He has a book coming out called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and it looks at caricature in the United States during times of war, and that's forthcoming from Penn State University Press, so it'll be exciting when that comes out.
Speaker: His research has been published in Women's Studies and Communication, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric in Public Affairs,
Speaker: the Western Journal of Communication and Rhetoric Society quarterly.
Speaker: And those are the heavy hitters for those of you who are not rhetoricians.
Speaker: So we're really excited to get to talk to Dr. Gilbert today.
Speaker: And again, our topic is political humor.
Speaker: And we were reminded of the cast of SNL as they negotiated whether to resume and when to resume after the 9-11 attacks.
Speaker: And Lorne Michaels asked Rudy Giuliani, who was the guest that week,
Speaker: Can we be funny?
Speaker: Referencing to the really heavy times that the country was in.
Speaker: And Giuliani responded, why start now?
Speaker: And I like that quote because it recognizes that humor is always with us, even in times that really seem very unfunny.
Speaker: and communication scholars and political scientists have recognized the way that humor upends hierarchy and the way that it speaks truth to power in a way that i think we would be remiss to ignore so we're excited to talk about that today now dr gilbert's chapter in our handbook is about alec baldwin and his representation of president trump now gilbert wrote this chapter
Speaker: 2016, 2017.
Speaker: So we're talking a lot about the election coverage that SNL did.
Speaker: But certainly I think the things that we can learn from these caricatures, here's Trump and the representation of Putin, really can help us inform the heavy political time that we're in now.
Speaker: The Grim Reaper was Steve Bannon, if you don't remember when this was.
Speaker: on the air.
Speaker: So I'm actually gonna stop now and I see that Dr. Gilbert is on our call here today.
Speaker: And so welcome, thank you for joining us.
Speaker: Thanks for having me and thank you for that great introduction.
Speaker: Awesome, we're excited to talk to you today.
Speaker: And so I want to start by asking you what got you interested in studying Saturday Night Live?
Speaker: I'm sort of a casual fan myself, but are there particular characters or comedians that have stuck out to you over the years?
Speaker: Yeah, well I'll say I was a casual fan for a while too, but I'll say just in response to one thing that you said, actually two things.
Speaker: Assumption College is actually now Assumption University as of June 10th.
Speaker: It just got university status.
Speaker: But you know one of the reasons that I got interested in humor early on is that there's a very real and powerful relationship between conceptions of the human condition and human comedy, and so it speaks to the humanity of the moment I think, but we can come back to that.
Speaker: In terms of what got me interested in SNL and skits, I was actually a pretty big fan of Adam Sandler as a kid.
Speaker: As a result of that, I got into Chris Farley's sketch comedy.
Speaker: And I can't really say that I'm a big fan of Sandler now, but Farley,
Speaker: He's still one of my favorite comedians.
Speaker: And he was probably the first to get me to really think hard about the relationship between humor and the body, humor and self-awareness, self-reflexivity, public judgment.
Speaker: And so I'm thinking, for those who remember, and I'm sure they do, I'm thinking of characters like Barney,
Speaker: the exotic dancer who competes with Patrick Swayze in an audition for Chip and Dale's.
Speaker: Cindy, the gluttonous sales lady.
Speaker: Matt Foley, of course, you know, the motivational speaker who coaches kids to prepare for lives that will ultimately lead them to a steady diet of government cheese and a home in a van down by the river, right?
Speaker: And so there was so much about his humor
Speaker: that was revelatory and free and yet so much that was constrained by cultural stereotypes and cultural habits of laughing at others.
Speaker: So it got me really interested early on.
Speaker: Other examples, I always liked Will Ferrell, specifically his Celebrity Jeopardy skit.
Speaker: Although I'm probably more interested in that skit now that it's been reconceived and redone as Black Jeopardy and hosted by Kenan Thompson or really Darnell Hayes as he plays it.
Speaker: I liked Wayne's World.
Speaker: I mean it was the mid-90s, I was a young teenager so there you go.
Speaker: But I was also really drawn actually to presidential parodies and what I would now call you know embodied caricatures of political officials and so Darrell Hammond as President Clinton, Will Ferrell as George W. Bush.
Speaker: When I got interested in them I eventually went back and watched Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey as George H.W.
Speaker: Bush,
Speaker: And honestly, you know, as I think about it and talk about it, a lot of what I've done in my scholarship of humor and comedy, it's really to go back and revisit things from my childhood and early adult years.
Speaker: So SNL, but also Mad Magazine, the comic street art of Banksy, you know, all of that has sort of stuck with me and influenced my work.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: I know we have some Farley fans on our webinar today, so shout out to them.
Speaker: And yeah, you've really hit the classics there.
Speaker: More recently, I've loved Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.
Speaker: Larry David does a great Bernie Sanders too.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: you alerted to this a little bit one of the things that makes SNL funny is the use of caricatures right so can you tell us a little bit about what to your mind is a caricature and where we typically find them in modern political discourse yeah I mean is it too easy to say everywhere I mean I could gosh I could go on and on obviously and I might hear so I apologize if I if I
Speaker: answer this question at length, but I guess I'd start by saying that caricature can be found in various places, various discourses from visual humor through literature to comic performances and even things that are less obviously comic, you know, like say,
Speaker: racial prejudices, ethnic categories, gender type casts, caricature influences, all of those things.
Speaker: And as with so much that retains any rhetorical force, these things are all sort of mutually constitutive.
Speaker: But I'll try and stick to humor.
Speaker: Probably the most important
Speaker: thing to think of in the definition, at least in my sense of character, is the family of terms that tends to come along with definitions of caricature.
Speaker: So mockery, imitation, distortion, parody, misrepresentation.
Speaker: If I remember correctly, the OED actually defines caricature as a grotesque likeness.
Speaker: There are some etymologies of the term that suggest that to caricature is actually to load or to exaggerate.
Speaker: There were some famous painters, the Karachi brothers in the 16th century, and they defined caricature as a loaded image.
Speaker: And so that's part of where we get that definition.
Speaker: You know, and all these sensibilities that kind of lead me to a sense that caricature is something that overloads or even burdens ways of seeing.
Speaker: in particular, and based on something that's seen, I tend toward the visual.
Speaker: And it tends to do so comically.
Speaker: So to caricature then would be to play with the scales and the magnitudes of appearances in order to cast a kind of comic judgment on the rhetorical weight of things.
Speaker: So for most of us who study caricature or anything like it, I think what's most interesting about that sort of a definitional setup is that it's not so much about just making fun of someone's appearance,
Speaker: for the sake of making fun, but rather that caricature says something about character.
Speaker: And even more about the communication practices that we use to characterize.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, I mean, this could be with regard to surface features.
Speaker: So, you know, like if you're character during a person, facial expression, style of dress, mannerisms, speech, comportment, you name it.
Speaker: Will Ferrell and his Bushisms when he used that word strategery, no one will forget that.
Speaker: You mentioned Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, Alec Baldwin, obviously, which we'll get to in a little bit more detail.
Speaker: And even Baldwin suggested a number of times when he was talking about early on his caricature of Trump that he tried to find his essence and to suggest certain things about Trump.
Speaker: And so he would like left eyebrow up, right one down, stick your face out, that sort of thing.
Speaker: And he even characterized him at one point, I can't remember which interview, but he characterized Trump as someone who's always looking for a better word and just can't seem to find it.
Speaker: But you know, it's way more than that when it comes to caricaturing Trump.
Speaker: As Baldwin has said and shown, you know, it's about idiocy, it's about demagoguery, it's about corruption.
Speaker: And so I guess I would say that the point is that caricature, at least political caricature the way that I would see it, is meant to reveal something deep about who somebody truly is, particularly when those features are amplified or magnified or made even more obvious than they might otherwise be, right?
Speaker: To bring it even more to the surface, something that's sort of deep in their character.
Speaker: And I think that's where like excess combines with the expression of character and the exaggeration of character.
Speaker: I mean, I could go on for sure, but.
Speaker: I'll let you respond to my response.
Speaker: I really appreciate you reminding us.
Speaker: I know we're talking about things in the context of political humor today, but I appreciate the reminder that caricature isn't always funny and that it in fact has deep relationships with some racial caricatures and some ugly components of visual culture, both in the past and now.
Speaker: If I could jump in there, I mean, yeah, one of the things I even have to resist doing at times is to just lean into the good side of caricature, because I think a lot of us, as you would say, humor speaks truth to power, it does all of these wonderful things for democratic politics and so on, but caricature is at work in so much,
Speaker: racist and ethnocentric imagery from editorial cartoons to the vaudeville stage to the kinds of distortions that crop up in everyday discourses and you know false impressions that are based on bad information bad faith bad intentions you name it and so i think it's important to kind of keep to keep that angle of caricature in mind as well
Speaker: So let's talk about Baldwin as Trump.
Speaker: You mentioned certainly that it's very much an embodied and a visual caricature.
Speaker: And maybe we've already talked about this a little bit, but what makes Baldwin as Trump so powerful and noteworthy?
Speaker: What are sort of the rhetorical hallmarks of this performance?
Speaker: Yeah, so I wrote this a few years ago now because this is when Trump was running and then just got elected.
Speaker: I'll make it a little bit more recent.
Speaker: Just a few weeks ago, some of you might have seen Baldwin revived his Trump caricature, which he's done a bunch of times
Speaker: on and off again since 2016.
Speaker: And he appeared in a cold open and imagined a faux Zoom call, a celebration for graduating the class from, I think it was St.
Speaker: Mary Magdalene by the expressway, if I remember correctly.
Speaker: And so Baldwin as Trump was the virtual commencement speaker and he showed up in a presidential jacket and red MAGA hat and he was congratulating the class of COVID-19.
Speaker: And the sketch is exemplary, right?
Speaker: And I think it is because it borrows material from real happenings.
Speaker: and then blows it out of proportion.
Speaker: So for instance, Baldwin defines himself as the valid dictator and then quickly announces that his valet tested positive for COVID-19 and so Trump Baldwin had to put on his own makeup.
Speaker: At one point in the skit, as he's praising himself as as Trump will do, as Baldwin as Trump will do, a number of the black students start to push back and then Baldwin as Trump says he wants to mute the jazz types.
Speaker: So he uses that phrase, mute the jazz types.
Speaker: Then it's not long before we learn that Trump was not their preferred speaker.
Speaker: They had actually voted for someone like Barack Obama or Michelle Obama or Axl Rose or even, what do they call them, the murder hornets to come and speak.
Speaker: But none of them would come and speak.
Speaker: So anyway, I bring up this one and recall that to mind because especially for those who are familiar with Baldwin's
Speaker: caricature but even for those who are just familiar with trump that skit is exemplary because it's not just about mocking the content of trump's character by making you know some comic interpretations of his words and deeds but it's also about using an overwhelming amount of the actual
Speaker: Our speaker seems to have frozen here.
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: Trump is pathetic.
Speaker: He's despicable, but he's plausible.
Speaker: And that's important.
Speaker: And so to your point about what are the hallmarks, the rhetorical hallmarks, mimesis or mimicry is a hallmark in caricature, which is obvious when he's kind of pretending to be Trump.
Speaker: But part of what I think is significant rhetorically is how Baldwin makes Trump
Speaker: even more vivid if that's possible as a comic image right and i think it's why i talk in the essay about the merger of comic alterations and real actualities you know it's why i talk about um what i've elsewhere described as the comic uncanny which is the appearance of something that is so not the real thing and yet so proximate to it that it's disturbing in many ways uh i think baldwin's caricature shows us
Speaker: the alternative reality show that Trump's presidency really is.
Speaker: Trump is the show, he's a spectacle, he is the public figure who functions like something of a singular conjuncture where so much of our culture and politics emanates and kind of revolves around.
Speaker: And it's interesting to speak to that hallmark and then wrap up my response here.
Speaker: I remember another comedian actually from SNL, he's a writer for SNL, John Mulaney, in a standup bit described Trump as a horse loose in a hospital.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And this is this is Baldwin as Trump.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He's that he's that joke made manifest.
Speaker: He is the embodiment of that kind of comic judgment.
Speaker: And he demonstrates just how much Trump is entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At one point in the chapter, you note that that caricature looks for revelations of true
Speaker: character in false appearances.
Speaker: I'm wondering if you kind of unpack that and tell us a little bit more about what you mean.
Speaker: It's really intriguing to think about the power of caricature in that way, that there's something true there.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, gosh, I don't want to drift into like a definition of truth here.
Speaker: But there was a British author from the 1800s named Bohun Lynch.
Speaker: He wrote a book on the history of caricature and he defined caricature as truthful misrepresentation.
Speaker: And part of what that definition captures, I think, is the extent to which caricature really relies on the artifice of appearance itself.
Speaker: Something else that captures this idea is, it's sort of almost conventional wisdom in some ways, I would say that a comic image like caricature can kind of show us something realer than the real thing.
Speaker: for lack of a better way to put it.
Speaker: And I think this is why you get notions that caricature and another way to define this too is the metaphor of the mirror.
Speaker: Caricature has often been linked to the mirror.
Speaker: It's been called a savage mirror, a carnival mirror, a distorted mirror.
Speaker: So there's something about that relationship about the thing that's seen and the thing that's kind of held up to the mirror.
Speaker: But again to kind of keep this in the realm of performance and character acting is something like caricature attack.
Speaker: I think a caricature can dramatize what is real about the truth that emerges from some person or other, right?
Speaker: And it can transmogrify its subject or object in order to bring out the
Speaker: say attitudinal investments and ideas that coalesce in the body of say a public figure and a body politic turns that person or that body politic into something like a cultural or rhetorical production unto itself.
Speaker: There's another skit that I can think of.
Speaker: I think it was from April.
Speaker: All of the weeks and days blend together.
Speaker: What is this time anymore?
Speaker: Yeah I don't even know but I think it was I think it was from April.
Speaker: I'm sure it was from April.
Speaker: where Baldwin tunes into the Weekend Update skit and he calls in and he's interviewed and at a certain point in the skit he discloses that he had workshopped names for the novel coronavirus, right?
Speaker: So he settled on foreign virus and Chinese virus, which we know that's actually true, but he was close to calling it, we learned from Baldwin, Crouching Tiger Hidden Symptoms.
Speaker: or General Tso's revenge, right?
Speaker: I mean, so think about what that suggests.
Speaker: Think about how it speaks to Trump's redeployment of Americanization as a way to advertise a very narrow set of values and beliefs and customs.
Speaker: you know whereby any acceptance of foreign influence and cultural otherness is predicated upon those influences or that otherness being consumed or exchanged in the market on u.s american terms specifically right so think about how it comments on gosh the rhetorical function of trump's predilection to create nicknames for people uh about how he performs his feeling that relationships are only good insofar as they're transactional
Speaker: And when it comes to foreign policy, international politics, domestic politicking, business dealing, double dealing, you name it, you know, these relationships are only good insofar as the U.S. comes out on top.
Speaker: Or really insofar as Trump's cultural and political imagination of the U.S. comes out on top in some rhetorically constituted reality.
Speaker: You know, there's much more I could say about the workshopping metaphor if you'd like, but I'll leave it there.
Speaker: I like that idea of truthful misrepresentation and I think one of the things that that coronavirus sketch that you pointed us to reminds us is that it's not just about sort of performing Trump's physical traits, the raised eyebrows, the protruding lips and the kind of hunching and that kind of thing, but it's also about performing his ideological commitments and his version of America, as you said.
Speaker: Ultimately then, what do you think it is that viewers of SNL really learn about Trump by watching Baldwin as Trump?
Speaker: Yeah, well, just to finish what I was thinking as you were kind of responding to the workshopping skit, I doubt that Trump ever workshopped anything, right?
Speaker: So it's a false representation, but it's a truthful misrepresentation to use Lynch's definition, because it really dramatizes a transformation of a very racialized and ethnic motive into political value, right?
Speaker: Into a caricature of Trump's approach to political rhetoric.
Speaker: So with that, what do we learn?
Speaker: I would say for many, probably not a whole lot more than they already know, or at least not a whole lot more than what they already think or feel about Trump.
Speaker: But in many ways, I don't think learning is the point.
Speaker: uh you know i think to be in on the jokes is to be a member of the initiated to some extent you know at least since snl i don't think it's really in the business of changing minds but that said i do think caricature uh or a caricature like baldwin's of trump um can teach us quite a bit about our cultural standards of comic judgment
Speaker: which I think allows us to really consider how caricature is a mode of humorous character attack that goes beyond mimicry for the sake of making fun, as I sort of alluded to before.
Speaker: Beyond that, I think it demonstrates and dramatizes our standards of public judgment.
Speaker: So consider that not a whole lot changes about perceptions of President Trump when he's moved from the serious, or some might say tragic, realm of official politics to the comic stage.
Speaker: So we might then ask what happens when we change the framework for judging what we see in here?
Speaker: What does caricature give us that say the commentary of other political comedy doesn't?
Speaker: And I think one thing that might not be so encouraging for those who, not unlike myself, wanna see humor as a civic good, is that Trump has sort of infiltrated the comic space.
Speaker: Right, so what if we imagine that Trump has a sort of comic license, which has long enabled him to get away with the kind of vulgar speech and outlandish conduct so familiar in caricatures of him and even in caricatures more broadly.
Speaker: I mean, how many times has he proclaimed after this or that offensive thing that he was just joking or he was being sarcastic or whatever he says.
Speaker: I mean, it was the year before he was elected in 2015 that he was dubbed the insult comic in chief.
Speaker: And it was just a couple months after the election that a number of scholars and commentators were thinking about how jokes actually helped him win, his own jokes, in a lot of ways because at his rallies, he sort of acts like a standup comic.
Speaker: And yet Trump is so much of a caricature of himself that he's both easy to caricature and incredibly difficult to caricature.
Speaker: Because if caricature relies on distortions and deformations, Trump is already a distortion and a deformation of things like presidentiality, presidential rhetoric, the rhetorical presidency, not to mention basic human decency.
Speaker: You know, he's already so deformed.
Speaker: And this is why I think that it's telling that Baldwin has so many times said that he's going to quit portraying Trump on SNL.
Speaker: You know, I think it says a lot about the idea that perhaps even comicality can't undo uncanniness.
Speaker: You know, perhaps the biggest lesson that we learned from Baldwin's caricature is that caricature has limits.
Speaker: It has real limits.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: One of the things that I think is kind of interesting about Baldwin as Trump and, you know, kind of the way this circulates through political discourse more broadly outside of the humor space is that we know that Trump watches SNL, at least sometimes, right?
Speaker: So how has Trump responded to Baldwin's caricature and can that tell us anything about the limits of caricature or its power?
Speaker: Yeah, this is gonna come as a big surprise to everyone.
Speaker: Tweets.
Speaker: I mean, that's the simple answer is like tweet attacks, if you want to put it in those terms.
Speaker: He's gone after Baldwin on Twitter a bunch of times.
Speaker: So going back to November, December, I think it must have been December 2016, he lambasted Baldwin for being unwatchable and unfunny.
Speaker: And actually, I remember Baldwin tweeted back.
Speaker: He said, release your tax returns and I'll stop.
Speaker: I remember that.
Speaker: Yeah, and then early in 2017, so the next year Trump started calling SNL boring and totally one-sided and bad television and actually pointed to Baldwin's caricature as evidence that the show is a hit job.
Speaker: on him, like that was his language, it was a hit job.
Speaker: In March 2018, when Baldwin won the Emmy for his performance, it was actually at that time when he started talking about how agonizing it is to portray Trump.
Speaker: And then Trump's tweet and response was sort of that classic, I know you are, but what am I?
Speaker: And he came back with something like, well, you're agonizing to watch, right?
Speaker: He tweeted that to Baldwin.
Speaker: And then as recently as last year, Trump started doing what he always does with anything or anyone that he doesn't like, he threatened retribution.
Speaker: Which is a telling response, not only to a comic portrayal, but to anything in the realm of what we might characterize as democratic free speech.
Speaker: But I think the thing to remember here, and again, this speaks to kind of that uncanniness, is that Trump loves conflict.
Speaker: In many ways, I think when he takes offense, he's not really trying to manage his reputation by correcting some false impression.
Speaker: He's really managing his reputation by feeding into and feeding off of the conflict, right?
Speaker: I mean, he's a firebrand.
Speaker: His brand, the Trump brand is largely built
Speaker: on so many rhetorical fires that he starts and that he has started.
Speaker: And he just continues to fan the flames if I push that metaphor too far.
Speaker: And it just so happens that this allows for that easy comic response.
Speaker: So this is kind of where the caricature comes in on the easy side of things.
Speaker: This is why we get Trump as the embodiment of the human dumpster fire.
Speaker: It very much fits.
Speaker: But then so again, there's that infiltration of the comic space.
Speaker: You know, Trump will just let these fires burn.
Speaker: He doesn't actually want anyone to let up on castigating him or giving him the fuel to keep stoking those fires and fanning those flames.
Speaker: I think what he likes is really promoting his view of America, of white America, of a certain kind of American character.
Speaker: as a spectacle of dominance unto himself.
Speaker: I guess the only saving grace that I would point to in Baldwin's caricature is that I think it really resonates with a lot of people and a lot of different people.
Speaker: And one thing I think is true is that Trump really doesn't like being laughed at.
Speaker: And so I think there is something about being laughed at that maybe pushes the buttons a little bit differently than other responses.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, it certainly fits in with what we hear him say in other contexts about the hit liberal media and that kind of thing.
Speaker: But what you just said at the end there about like there being something slightly different about him being laughed at as opposed to just critiqued in a way that he often is by the quote unquote liberal media is really interesting.
Speaker: So we've talked maybe around this a little bit and talked a little bit about the role of humor in a free speech democratic society, but I'm curious to hear you reflect a little bit more on a show like SNL and democratic politics.
Speaker: It seems especially relevant.
Speaker: A friend of mine reminded me of this yesterday that there was a time 10 years ago when most young adults were saying they were getting their news
Speaker: from The Daily Show and The Colbert Rapport.
Speaker: And I think that that has probably moved more to social media than to comics, but certainly there is an important role that comedy and political humor plays in a democratic society.
Speaker: So I'm curious to hear you say a little bit more about that.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this is literally an ancient problematic, the relationship between democracy and comedy.
Speaker: I would say, I guess ideally a show like SNL provides what I would call the rhetorical equipment for recasting the week in review, like using the skits as resources for maybe rethinking and re-imagining the most prominent of current events and putting them in a comic frame.
Speaker: to kind of go back to what I've been saying, an easy thing to say would be that SNL, like so many of those other late shows, maybe going back to Stewart and even earlier than Stewart, it offers a way to find humor and stuff that's really not that funny and to take it seriously in a comic way.
Speaker: The harder thing I think to reconcile is that the performances on SNL in character and I think in their best moments actually can enact something of a form of humility
Speaker: and humor by the characters, they step into somebody else's shoes, they adopt a different persona and they do it live.
Speaker: It's prepared, but they do it live.
Speaker: But I think that if you recognize that, it kind of speaks to the troubles of spectatorial politics in democracy.
Speaker: to watch SNL, I think is to practice or really to witness comic judgment from a distance.
Speaker: I think it's to look on and to see political officials and democratic governance, you know, to see how they're perceived, but you're not really getting anything new about democratic politics, you know, in terms of how it could or should be practiced.
Speaker: And so, you know, it's nice to think that there's some civic education at work, but
Speaker: I would say that an educative setup would be more interested in showing citizens how to do democracy in some way, not how to debunk it or not how to simply debunk it.
Speaker: And so I guess I'd say that SNL is not so much a guide for democratic politics as it's sort of a showcase for its gaffes.
Speaker: But you know, then again, I would say that, you know, as part of a comic rhetorical culture in the US and US American democracy in that context,
Speaker: SNL does remind us the value of comic imitation.
Speaker: So to go back to the hallmark of caricature, this is what I mean when I mention that value of humility when it is linked to even the excessive imitation in something like a caricature.
Speaker: There's actually a really good book, Angus Fletcher makes some good points about that book and about that idea in his book, Comic Democracies.
Speaker: And specifically by pointing to the lessons that can be learned from a character like Shakespeare's Falstaff and his performance of the consequences that can follow from shared speech and thought and action.
Speaker: And you get that from Trump a lot.
Speaker: He kind of plays out the ridiculous consequences that could and do follow from some of what's going on in
Speaker: in the real world and so you know i guess the main point is that comicality and shows like snl they can really show us how popular rule if we move it outside of spectatorial politics it's as much about rhetorical authority as it is about institutional power so
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: I have two more quick questions for you.
Speaker: Although, since the next one's about ethics, maybe not as quick.
Speaker: I'm curious, certainly we've seen kind of the limits of caricature in your responses.
Speaker: And I think I really appreciate the idea that that it doesn't show us necessarily how to enact
Speaker: but it does show us some of the limits of democracy.
Speaker: But is there a moral or ethical dimension to using caricature as a tack?
Speaker: Should we encourage it?
Speaker: Should we discourage it?
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: I mean, it's sort of like the, when does it go too far question?
Speaker: What is the line?
Speaker: And yeah, I think anything can go too far.
Speaker: And sometimes, especially in comic contexts, I think sometimes it's hard to know when something has crossed the line until it's been crossed.
Speaker: And so the limits of comicality and I think the threshold for any comic license, if we want to call it that, has a whole lot to do with collective levels of tolerance for offensiveness, for vulgarity, for indecency.
Speaker: And I would mention that so-called cancel culture has really complicated this and even disrupted a sense of humor that puts comedy kind of in some rhetorical courtship with impunity.
Speaker: And so the comic license gets a little bit troubled there.
Speaker: But with regard to Baldwin's caricature, I think we definitely get a glimpse of the loudishness of the president himself, except that, as I've said, the comic materials are mostly taken right from the source.
Speaker: Which means that you're getting sort of comic imitations of things that are already widely deemed crude or uncouth or you know, however you want to characterize it.
Speaker: And so I guess I would actually maybe point to other examples that maybe force us to think in the same comic realm about our levels of tolerance for humor that goes too far.
Speaker: So some of you might remember Kathy Griffin's
Speaker: Infamous self-portrait, which she characterized as basically a caricature, right, from 2017 when she stares straight into the camera in a picture and grips Trump's bloodied head in her right hand.
Speaker: And there she is, right?
Speaker: And it's considered comic.
Speaker: And I would say in response to that, there's certainly a history to regicides, real or imagined, in the context of democratic revolutions.
Speaker: There's certainly a deep history of the relationship between comedy and violence, not to mention comedy and democracy.
Speaker: But does this go too far?
Speaker: Is it humorous?
Speaker: Is it comic?
Speaker: Is it funny?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But I think very often across history, the kings and queens of democratic comedy
Speaker: you know, from fools to the funniest of those on comics stages, you know, so stand-ups on stages, on screen and so on, you know, they've been those who rhetorically kill kings.
Speaker: So, I don't know, you know, maybe another example, if you've seen it, if you haven't, I'll bring it up because it's worth checking out.
Speaker: But I think it was also, it might've been in 2016, but there was an activist group
Speaker: called In Decline, I think is the name that they go by.
Speaker: And they put up a bunch of life-size statues of Trump across five or six major cities in the US.
Speaker: And the statues were of Trump completely naked.
Speaker: They were grotesque.
Speaker: They were lifelike.
Speaker: They were called the emperor has no balls.
Speaker: Too far.
Speaker: I don't know and then you can push this into the editorial cartooning realm where you get Michael De Adder's depiction from last year where he shows Trump playing golf through a water hazard where the same migrant father and child that drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande, you know, were depicted as dead in the water.
Speaker: You know, so all of these and more, you know, there are tons more, I think all of them entail
Speaker: some kind of caricature as character attack and all of them are performative in some way.
Speaker: But my own sense of comicality is that it's not really anything unless it pushes boundaries.
Speaker: And so I think the key is to keep in mind the balance that really needs to be struck between the comic ethic of an artist showing an audience what they might need to see
Speaker: with that need for humanity and humility, even in the most scathing criticism.
Speaker: Yeah, I like that, humanity and humility.
Speaker: That's important.
Speaker: The last thing I wanna ask you is, is there anything that's making you laugh?
Speaker: What are you watching, listening to that's making you laugh about politics, if anything?
Speaker: Yeah, so back to your mention of time, right?
Speaker: What has happened to time?
Speaker: So honestly, my life is so hectic these days with a three-year-old and a five-year-old and a life partner who also works full-time.
Speaker: So I'm more likely to find refuge on my bike in the early morning or strumming the guitar in the backyard.
Speaker: So, you know, but I do check out Seth Meyers' segment, A Closer Look, usually the morning after he does it while I'm making coffee.
Speaker: Sometimes I'll check out, along with that, Colbert's monologue or his interviews.
Speaker: I do look at editorial cartoons, so I check out Anne Telnace's work.
Speaker: featured on the Washington Post, David Rowe, he's an Australian cartoonist.
Speaker: So in that I look at the week, right, so the publication of the week, I read the nib.
Speaker: I still do read the onion from time to time.
Speaker: I do still check out the Borowitz report from time to time.
Speaker: I did watch a few episodes of, what was it, John Krasinski's show, Some Good News, I think it was.
Speaker: I've enjoyed many memes that have to do with parenting and pandemic times that people have shared.
Speaker: But you know, I honestly, you mentioned at the top, I just finished writing a book, it's off at the press.
Speaker: And so I've been mostly reading for pleasure now, actually.
Speaker: And I just started Salman Rushdie's latest novel, Key Shot, which is a quasi retelling of Don Quixote with a US American spin on it.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: So that's where I'm at right now.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: And thank you for sharing those insights with us.
Speaker: We're going to jump into the Q&A.
Speaker: We probably won't have time to get through all of these questions because we don't want to take too much of your time.
Speaker: So one friend mentions that, yeah, the Trump sketches don't really change many minds because they basically tell us what we already know.
Speaker: But she points to Palin and Fay as Palin as maybe one that had some different ramifications, perhaps because we didn't know as much about Palin as we know about Trump.
Speaker: Thoughts?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I remember that skit very well.
Speaker: And so I think it does in some ways go back to my sense that caricature, to function as caricature, has to kind of amplify or magnify one or the other of two things if I kind of put it in a binary.
Speaker: Either what we already know and feel, right?
Speaker: So you're kind of like, oh, we think Trump is a whatever, you know, input your variable and then you see the caricature and it gets magnified and you go, oh my gosh, yes.
Speaker: of course that's that's how he is and and that's how the corruption plays out and so on but also on the other side of that it can amplify things that we didn't know and so is there learning or some education that goes in with that that can maybe change our opinion for sure but i also do think that that goes back to the idea that uh it's my sense that a lot of what gets reflected on is not just the character but it's the standards of judgment that we have you know in that instance a lot of the commentary revolved around
Speaker: Is this what we really would expect and want from a political official at this level?
Speaker: Which again becomes complicated when Trump gets elected president, right?
Speaker: Because a lot of the caricatures are dealing with just that.
Speaker: I don't know if people are familiar with the band Dispatch, but I'm a pretty big fan of Dispatch.
Speaker: And they have a great song and it's called Don Juan Tango.
Speaker: And in the song, there's a lyric that goes something like, you know, this is what we feared, the politician in the mirror, right?
Speaker: And so you're getting a representation of either the thing that you didn't think could happen or the thing that you expected.
Speaker: And oh my gosh, it's worse than we thought.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: So one of our other viewers here was wondering if you think that political satire and humor is going to have a bigger role as there's an upcoming election, particularly in the context of the pandemic.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I think it's playing a role.
Speaker: I think there is still an extent, so many ways to characterize it.
Speaker: Comedy, satire, humor, however, playing with those definitions.
Speaker: I think it's as powerful, maybe differently powerful now relative to say kind of the Stuart Colbert era as it was called.
Speaker: But I do think that
Speaker: some of the rhetorical force of certain comic portrayals are being weakened, are being mitigated and muted in certain ways because of what I referred to earlier as that infiltration of the comic space by those in political office who are outwardly, openly and celebrated as vulgar, crude, you name it.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: instead of comedy or humor being a resource for troubling that sort of behavior or that sort of way of thinking, they blend in problematic ways for comedy and humor.
Speaker: So I really don't know.
Speaker: So we've talked a little bit about how SNL encourages sort of spectator politics.
Speaker: Is it possible for comic programs to actually do something, do you think, that could strengthen democracy and encourage us to do more than just watch?
Speaker: Yeah, and you know, so there's obviously value in watching.
Speaker: You know, one of the things that I very often tell my students, I just actually taught a course on American humor, but also just when we're talking about the rhetorical setup of things and approaching things rhetorically, you know, often I'll use comic examples and I'll say, you know, there's a huge, crucial,
Speaker: undeniable value to visuality and spectatorship in a democracy in particular.
Speaker: And you can go back to the ancient Greek stage in the theater to be reminded of that.
Speaker: And I say that because oftentimes, and this is what I say to my students, you learn that when spectators are watching whatever's on stage, they're also watching the other spectators to gauge how they're reacting so they can sort of figure out
Speaker: what do we want to collectively do in reaction to this?
Speaker: So I think there's a supremely democratic value to shared spectatorship, to figuring out based on what we've just seen and heard and witnessed, how do we all feel, what do we think, what do we want to do with that?
Speaker: That said, I also do think that someone like John Oliver,
Speaker: plays a really interesting role in the comic space, you know, because he's doing comedy, for sure.
Speaker: He's doing what some would characterize as political satire, but it is squarely in the realm of civic education.
Speaker: His show is very much about, let's do the comic spin on things, but let's really situate this in deep histories that need to be grappled with, and deep ideas and ideologies that need to be grappled with.
Speaker: If we're gonna take full stock of, say, why what you just heard as a joke is really a joke.
Speaker: You know, and so I think it depends a lot on the genre of comedy or even what the individual comic artist is trying to do.
Speaker: Yeah, I like the idea of shared spectatorship.
Speaker: I think there's something interesting there.
Speaker: Eric is wondering how you would compare our most recent presidents and their caricatures on SNL.
Speaker: Baldwin as Trump, Hammond as Clinton, Farrell as George W. Bush.
Speaker: Are there comparisons you can make there?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, yeah, their comparisons because they all share the mimicry of caricature.
Speaker: They all share the fact that caricature relies so much on honing in on something, some particular feature, whether it is a mannerism or a habit of speech or whatever, or an ideology and really amplifying it to the absurd, to the ridiculous.
Speaker: and playing on that as a way to kind of undermine characterizations or maybe just to kind of overreach with some characterizations that we have of these figures.
Speaker: I think I would tend to dwell more on the difference.
Speaker: And the reason is because I think that Baldwin is actually quite candid.
Speaker: I think he's real.
Speaker: I think he's serious when he says, this is agonizing.
Speaker: This is so hard because the weightiness of what he's doing, I think makes it so that his caricature feels like it's either not enough or it's not doing what it should be doing from a comic standpoint, or just that it's perpetuating something that Trump is celebrated for.
Speaker: You know, I think that is the biggest concern that I would have as someone who is interested in
Speaker: of these presidential caricatures on SNL is that we're now in a moment where the sorts of things, again, that you go back to like the crudeness, the vulgarity, that infiltration of the comic space that I do think is happening, we're in a moment where the celebrations of the comic doing that and the celebrations of the president who's being made fun of are both celebrated.
Speaker: And there's a festivity around both that's really concerning.
Speaker: You know, I mean, I wrote a piece on some really interesting,
Speaker: crude and vulgar portrayals of President Barack Obama a couple years ago and situated it in the idea of festive racism, right?
Speaker: So the idea that, I mean, you actually just saw this recently, there were some counter protesters to the Black Lives Movement that while Black Lives Movement protesters were walking by, they reenacted the police officer killing George Floyd.
Speaker: Some could really disturbingly say, that he was joking.
Speaker: That was a crude caricature.
Speaker: And so that's what I mean, like to bring it back to the question, it really makes me worried and concerned that there is such a difference because of the rhetorical weight of what's going on with the actual president that's being caricatured.
Speaker: Not to say that Bush too wasn't horrible with his foreign party.
Speaker: I don't wanna be in that camp of saying like, oh, look at W. Bush just came out and said something really nice about race relations.
Speaker: I don't think that takes away from anything that he did in his presidency, but there is a difference.
Speaker: I'm gonna ask two more quick questions.
Speaker: Jess is wondering, she works in communication, so this makes sense, but elected officials have tried to reclaim the narrative by appearing on SNL.
Speaker: How do you think about that?
Speaker: Is it a good communication strategy?
Speaker: What if they're not funny?
Speaker: Yeah, you know, honestly, if I were a political advisor, I would certainly advise pretty much any politician I could think that I would work with to go to go on one of those shows.
Speaker: Because that's, that's not so much infiltration, as it's acknowledging the power of the space as something that's meaningful to the democratic populace.
Speaker: And I think it's telling with regard to that question that
Speaker: Trump has refused to go on these shows.
Speaker: He has refused to go to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Speaker: He has refused to grant any sort of legitimacy to these comic spaces.
Speaker: And so if anything, I think other political officials, those who are trying to do work that is kind of pushing back
Speaker: on Trumpism, it's vital.
Speaker: I don't, you know, it's absolutely vital.
Speaker: I think it needs to happen.
Speaker: Yeah, interesting.
Speaker: So the last question I want to ask is about the link between shows like this or caricature and consumption of pop culture and that kind of thing.
Speaker: Is there a sense in which, you know, this type of political humor just sort of feeds kind of the general US capitalist consume, consume, consume stuff?
Speaker: And if so, should we be okay with that?
Speaker: Is there power here?
Speaker: So what about the link between humor and consumerism and consumption?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, well, there's obviously power in money.
Speaker: There's power in consumption practices.
Speaker: There's power in decisions we make about what to support financially and what we don't.
Speaker: And so to think that that isn't in some ways a useful frame to think about things.
Speaker: I mean, all of these problems that we're seeing with regard to racial justice and justice for those of particular gender identities and so on, it's fundamentally tied to economic justice as well, which is why there are some re-imaginations now of
Speaker: what we even do with a capitalist setup of a democracy.
Speaker: But, you know, in terms of this context and comedy, does it feed into that mindset where you just kind of like consume and enjoy and, you know, it's like that idiom of use just once and then destroy and then wait for it to come back again.
Speaker: it's it's hard to like i just resist the the urge to universalize any of it because i think it depends i think that with some of the caricatures that have come up you know that it can actually make a difference it can actually stick you know it's not just something like oh i watched on saturday and laughed and went to bed and then sunday i moved on with my day and forgot what i saw you know and so i think you can't
Speaker: lose sight of the extent these things seep into people's ways of thinking and speaking and acting.
Speaker: Again, I would really hesitate to say that this is all bad or that it's all good, but I do think it demonstrates a limit where if it just gets caught up in, oh, if we just kind of make fun of
Speaker: Trump or anyone like Trump and we show him to be the imbecile that he is and we stop there and then we don't translate that into other areas of discourse and political activity then it can become I did what I was supposed to do because I watched the show and believed what I know I should believe and then I moved on and so that's where I think it would become a limiting factor specifically in the realm of consumption and commercial politics
Speaker: Thank you for those reflections.
Speaker: I appreciate that we were able to both kind of recognize humor as a powerful force, but something that has limits as well.
Speaker: So thank you for joining us, Dr. Gilbert, and certainly there's a lot to do to make the society that we want, and those things go beyond laughing, but I think laughing helps too, right?
Speaker: CARP Lab is on Twitter, so follow us on Twitter if you wanna know more, and we will see you next time.
Speaker: Thank you all.
Speaker: Thanks.
