They aren’t giving up him just because he ain’t president…
He just the gift that keeps giving….
And works HARD at it……
Humor could become permanently partisan in the post-Trump era, experts say, as comedians remain fixated on the former president instead of his successor.
While the current commander in chief is typically the target of jokes galore on late-night TV, President Biden has served as more of a pillow than a punching bag.
Following the often wild, drama-filled four years of the Trump administration, Jimmy Kimmel said on his show last week, Biden is “pleasantly boring.” The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host gently ribbed Biden for using a whispery “sex voice” when answering reporters’ questions at a press conference….
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While comedy tends to shift with the change in presidential administrations, Shippensburg University political science professor Alison Dagnes says that prior to 2016, comedians would generally take a both-sides approach to their barbs. But with Trump’s shock White House win, says Dagnes, “comedians decided, ‘OK, we dropped the ball. We weren’t ringing the alarm bell loud enough. We’re going to go after him.’”
“They became far more partisan,” Dagnes says, with the mindset of “‘if [the audience doesn’t] agree with us, then we don’t care.’ They were fine with that.”
Comedian and “Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead says she’s “been doing this and centering politics and social issues since the early ’90s, and there were years where you couldn’t do it in your sets.”
“Very few late-night shows, until Trump, focused profoundly on politics,” Winstead says.
Americans already fiercely divided by politics could come to see TV comedians less as sources of laughs and more as tribal team member — or opponents.
“Clapter is the term for an audience agreeing with your political point, but you weren’t funny,” says Dagnes, the author of “A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor.”
“So instead of laughing, the audience claps. Now, it’s just a lot more clapter than it is actual laughter. And people are OK with that,” she says.
To be fair, Trump gave comedians a lot to work with. Biden isn’t currently being sued by any adult-film stars, for example, or golfing regularly at clubs that he owns while making the Secret Service rent its own carts.
Now Trump’s out of office, but the zingers about him are still flying. With the ex-president holding rallies, frequently issuing several fiery news releases a day and doing TV interviews, many comics are still making him the topic du jour….
image…Credit…ABC
NY Times