Is Dead Donald Trump funny?
understanding gallows humor in the trump, Era
There may never have been a u.s. President who has more thoroughly encouraged public Mockery than Donald trump
It is not just that he is woefully unprepared for the job that he doesn't seem to be able to speak English
That he paints his face orange and uses a comb-over or that he is a domestic bully it is that trump himself loves to mock
humiliate and laugh at others
Trump's own Cavalier joke seemed to invite an open season on Jokes back of him
Well before he ran for office
Trump had created a reputation for himself as a nasty
Sarcastic Jocasta who especially enjoyed humiliating women and minorities
Recall that on the campaign trail. He even joked that he could shoot someone and not lose any supporters
Because we have a president who regularly ridicules and derives others we have witnessed a real mainstreaming of some pretty nasty trump jokes
Trump is a joke after all so it is of little surprise that there is a whole lot of trump humor out there
But what I'm interested in for this piece are the jokes about a dead trump is dead trump funny
And if not, what does the rise of these jokes tell us about humor in the trump?
Era there have been a number of High-profile dead trump jokes the Kathy griffin
Decapitated head photo Snoop Dogg's music video featuring a mod shooting of a clownish trump and Johnny Depp's quip about actors
Assassinating presidents are only three of the most well known
While it is a hard line to draw we have to distinguish between people calling for trump to be
Assassinated and people joking about it since there is a real difference between jokes and literal threats
according to data reported by Piers Morgan after Madonna suggested she would like to blow up the white house there were no less than
12,000 tweets in two weeks calling for trump to be killed
Clearly not all of those tweets were in Jest
Dead Trump jokes are not identical to threats although there will be times when folks making threats will try to claim
They were joking to avoid consequences
Using what have called the Colbert defense
So why does someone joke about killing a leader?
What is gained by it and why might it be funny?
jokes about Dead leaders are usually not about the specific person, but rather about what that leader represents and
Because they are jokes about someone in power it is more common to tolerate a dead president joke than one about a dead child
for instance
Dead trump is only funny because he is a powerful figure
the joke punches up hitting someone with power and prestige that makes it more commonly accepted as within bounds and
If that leader is a bombastic bullying jerk Dead jokes are likely to be considered even funnier
while it's generally the sense that the gryphon and the DEv jokes were unfunny and
Inappropriate some of us might still find other dead trump jokes funny
For instance for some myself included the rise of trump pinatas is pretty hilarious
While it might seem hypocritical to prefer one dead trump joke to another there is a clear difference between the photo of a mock
decapitated trump and the Pinata of him first a pinata
while meant to be beaten to pieces is simply not as gruesome an imaging second it is trump's own mocking of
Mexicans that makes a trump, Kenyatta such a gratifying joke
Given the fact that you can buy extra-large trump Kenyatta's at Walmart clearly. I'm not alone in finding it funny
But to be fair a trump Kenyatta still belongs to the cohort of Dead trump jokes
While metaphorical it is still a basically violent joke too
So why would it be funny and why for instance we do not find Walmart's Obama pinata funny in the same way?
the first key to Understanding Dead Trump jokes is
Recognizing that all jokes depend on creating a group of it getters those in I'm a joking but those targeted by it
When you create a dead trump joke you are appealing to those that align with your views and you are ostracizing those that don't
All humor works this way, but jokes about death really exacerbate those divisions
Paul Lewis analyzes what he calls, but wars that is debates over what constitutes good and bad types of jokes
He points out that, but more is generally tracked in predictable ways
We don't like jokes about people or things we hold in high Esteem, and we find jokes about people and things we dislike immensely funny
This is Generally true across the political spectrum
That said there have been general political divisions over the lines between appropriate jokes and those that aren't
the left with their so-called PC attitudes
Generally considers a whole set of jokes to be if not poor taste, then outright hate speech
For example for many of us rape jokes are off-limits
Just as jokes that target minorities are out
Meanwhile the right led by the likes of ann coulter argues that anything and everything is fair game for a joke
If a joke offends you they argue then you need to grow tougher skin a deal
What we think is funny, and how we respond to jokes has become as stark a dividing line as red versus blue
But dead trump jokes have created some unexpected outcomes
First they have weirdly led the right to rise up in indignation over trump jokes emulating the sort of PC
Snowflake hissy fits they condemned from the left
Meanwhile the so-called soft you left finds some fairly gruesome trump humor to be pretty funny
One of the best ways to impact whether dead trump as funny is to track what happened in the wake of the Kathy griffin
decapitated trump story to refresh your memory
Griffin posed for a gruesome photo that had her holding a disturbing likeness of a beheaded trump
Griffin later apologized
But I'm less interested in her part of the story than in the collective response to it on
The left the common retorted and griffing photo was to remind everyone of the lynched obama joked that circulated when he was president
Another common anti trump response was to remind folks of how ted nugent threatened Obama at a 2012 national rifle association
Meeting in st.. Louis. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop that the obama administration's heads off in November in
Contrast to his outrage over Griffin's pic. Here was trump's response to nugent's threat
Nugent would later be invited to the white house by Trey
All of this combines to reveal to us that trump and his supporters are hypocrites
That's not exactly a huge surprise
The reaction to the Griffon pick on the left was worse
I think and it exposes the way that the trump era has really challenged our collective ability to practice critical thinking
Saying that Griffin's pick was not offensive because there were lots of offensive jokes about Obama is a completely immature and unsophisticated
Argument, and
Even if we want to protect first amendment free speech rights
We should be able to have a reasonable conversation about jokes in protest or that are offensive
Trump may invite these sorts of jokes, but we don't have to humor him
There is a darker side to the trump gallows humor and that is the notion that dead trump jokes are funny because they offer to
Tharsis in a time of crisis
Calling these jokes gallows humor is not a reference to trump as dead
It is a reference to the idea that many in our nation and around the world feel like we are a doomed
Rabble rouser explains that gallows humor is defined as witticism in the face of an in response to a hopeless situation
It arises from stressful traumatic or life-threatening situations often in
Circumstances such that death is perceived as impending and unavoidable
There is a collective catharsis offered by jokes in the face of trauma and crisis
This is why we laugh in awkward moments
Mocking a leader resync is threatening us offers our brains a chance to take a break from fear
And that's why it can feel so good to laugh at Dead trump
It's a short-term fix
Though and while all dead trump jokes are not equal there are more reasons to avoid them than to celebrate them
Besides the fact that we would do well not to allow the trump
Era to pull us all into a swamp of hate speech and invective. It's worth remembering that trump is president
That means that if a joke has sharp enough teeth then the secret service will investigate
But the real reason to Avoid Dead trump jokes is the type of humor they depend on
Dead Trump jokes are pure mockery
They make us laugh because they cut him down
They gave us pleasure because they make him suffer
There is Catharsis in the joke, but there's no critical thinking
Given that the trump administration offers a daily assault on reason and reality
the best humor to take him down will be ironic satire not comedic derision on
The eve of Trump's inauguration Michael moore called for an army of comedy to combat the trump agenda
But moore didn't mean any sort of comedy or any sort of joke
He meant satire with it's ironic wit and sharp insight
Rather than the chief joke we need to favor the sort of comedy that helps us make sense of the crazy
so rather than the crude dead trump joke we need more critical and creative uses of Irony and parody the
Best trump jokes will be ones that go right over his head not the ones that cut it off
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