We endured four-plus years of Trump jokes across the comedy landscape, and that’s exactly how it should be. As president, Donald Trump’s bluster proved to be catnip for satirists, and presidents should always stand atop the comedy world’s hit list.
A killer punchline can make a politician’s knees buckle.
Yet a not-so-funny thing happened after Trump left office. Neither late-night comedians nor “Saturday Night Live” would let him exit, stage right. You could forgive comics for lamenting his absence from the Beltway stage, and President Joe Biden seemed far less gag-worthy than his predecessor. Besides, we’d already had eight years of Vice President Biden.
And then President Biden opened his mouth.
We’ve spent the past year watching the 79-year-old leave a trail of gaffes around the world. The miscues happen almost daily now, but the humdingers deserve special attention:
· Biden says his son Beau died in Iraq. (Beau Biden actually died after a battle with brain cancer.)
· Biden calls upon Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) at a White House conference honoring her work fighting hunger, forgetting she died weeks earlier following a car accident. “Jackie, are you here?” he asked. “Where’s Jackie … she was going to be here.”
· Biden’s public-appearance cheat-sheet goes viral, showing how he needs child-like commands to get through an event.
· Biden tells a Maryland crowd, “Let me start off with two words: Made in America.”
That’s a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of gaffes, suggesting to some — perhaps even a growing number —that he isn’t mentally fit to serve as commander in chief. And let’s not forget how often the White House walks back Biden’s on-the-record riffs.
President Gerald Ford stumbled a time or two despite his athletic past, and “SNL” star Chevy Chase made it his signature look back in 1975.
Such presidential faux pas are all prime fodder for comedians, of course. The jokes write themselves, as do the comic memes. That’s the lifeblood of late-night TV, political shorthand that makes the arduous writing process easier: Bush is dumb, Clinton is horny, Trump is an egomaniac. It’s neither kind nor sophisticated, but it’s how the satire game goes.
Similarly, President Biden’s gaffes should be front-and-center via Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and the rest of Team Late Night. The first sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” the now-legendary “cold open,” should feature Biden impersonators on a regular basis.
Instead, late-night monologues pound away at Trump, still, along with Georgia Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker, Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson and, of course, the Trump family. The first “cold open” of the new “SNL” season recreated the Mar-a-Lago raid on Chez Trump.
How could comedians ignore the current president, a figure cartoonishly ripe for ridicule? Sure, “SNL” will mention Biden’s mental fog now and then, but it’s usually in passing and never the focus of a sketch.
A few months ago, late-night comics began noticing Biden’s failings around the same time some unflattering media profiles went live, but they quickly reverted to form as the midterms drew near.
It gets worse.
Vice President Kamala Harris gives ol’ Joe a run for his money on the gaffe game. Harris’ word-salad musings are the stuff of social-media lore in less than two years. Here’s an example, from a Harris speech at Claflin University in South Carolina in September:
“We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community.”
There’s plenty more where that came from. Plus, Harris’ staff turnover is legendary, and she has little to show for the assignments Team Biden put on her lap, like overseeing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Again, late-night comedians are standing down rather than poking fun at the vice president. They comedically pummeled past Republican VPs like Mike Pence and Dan Quayle. Satirist Adam McKay made an entire film — 2018’s “Vice” — skewering another Republican vice president, Dick Cheney.
And think of all the politicians who demanded we stay locked down for our safety during the pandemic but lived it up when the cameras clicked off, like Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D), whose excuse was that she was “feeling the spirit.”
Stand-alone gaffes also deserve attention. Consider election-denier Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who has been skewered for appearing to suggest an ingenious plan to battle inflation: Abort more babies. (Abrams’ campaign insists her comment was taken out of context.)
The pattern here is obvious.
Biden, Harris, Abrams, Newsom and Breed are all Democrats. And today’s political satirists lean monumentally to the political left, leaving late-night upstart Greg Gutfeld to speak to the half of the country ignored in that process — but he can’t do it all from his Fox News perch.
The Johnny Carson model of tweaking the Left and the Right is but a memory. We’re left with something far worse, a comedy landscape that refuses to hold the powerful in check with laughter, a perfect way to keep politicians honest.
This dereliction of duty, however, is no laughing matter.
Christian Toto is the editor of the conservative entertainment site “HollywoodInToto.com, the Right Take on Entertainment.” He is the author of “Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.”