How Michelle Wolf Blasted Open the Fictions of Journalism in the Age of Trump
On Saturday, the comedian Michelle Wolf, performing at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner, delivered the most consequential monologue so far of the Donald Trump era. Some of the attendees claimed to have walked out of the dinner in protest during the performance; others, like the Presidents press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have been lauded for remaining stoically in place in the face of scathing humor. The tension of it all might have been too much. The Times White House correspondent Peter Baker lamented on Twitter, I dont think we advanced the cause of journalism tonight. Commentators wonderednot for the first timewhether the White House Correspondents Association should discontinue the tradition of having comedians perform at the function.
Wolfs monologuesharp, unflinching, and pointedly unfunny in placescalled bullshit on the role laughter has been performing in Trumps America. Over the last year and a half, much of the culture has sought relief in humor in much the same way as citizens of extremely repressive countries. Back in the early nineties, in her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić described laughter as the ultimate personal triumph over the daily humiliations of life under Communist rule. In todays Russia, people make jokes about the fear Vladimir Putin inspires (he opens the fridge and the jellied meat begins to quake, but he reassures it by saying he is getting the yogurt) or the suicidal nature of Russian foreign policy (well retaliate against American sanctions by bombing the Russian city of Voronezh), the same way that they used to joke about Leonid Brezhnevs inability to talk or stay awake during official functions. Jokes serve a transparent purpose: they reclaim the power to defineand inhabitreality. They also reclaim the goodness of laughter, for regimes weaponize laughter to mock their opponents, creating what the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym called totalitarian laughter. Its opposite is anti-totalitarian laughter.
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