For as long as I can remember, which in this case is way longer than usual, I have been a fan of dark humour. In my early years, when one tests limits, this took the form of crudely horrible jokes about lawyers, Helen Keller and one abhorrent family. Because I like you, I won’t go into detail.
These jokes were cruel, as kids can be, but aimed at abstractions, as we knew little to nothing of the targets of our immature venom. But like most kids, when we’d seen or faced enough of the low-level but devastating cruelty our peers could dish out, we came to understand that actual cruelty is never funny.
The United States is, at present, being run by a collection of sadists, sociopaths and supplicants, with the worst of the lot clustered in my hometown. Two related statistics are enough to demonstrate the Stalin-like level of their depravity. The Lancet found that USAID-funded programmes saved an estimated 91 million lives – a third of them children – in 133 countries over the past 20 years. It further found that Trump’s decimation of USAID will cause an estimated 14.5 million deaths in just the next five years, all of them preventable. USAID’s budget averaged $22.9 billion annually from 2001-24 – a cost that would easily have been covered had not Trump decided, with his Big Beautiful Bill, to forego $387 billion in revenue over 10 years by allowing instant 100% depreciation claims for such things as private jet purchases by corporates and the super-wealthy.
Trump and his band of sniggering sycophants are quickly destroying a country that was, for over a century, a seriously flawed but steady beacon of hope and potential security blanket for an increasingly insecure world. Maga has made its second term an ongoing blitzkrieg against pretty much everything good about the US.
“The cruelty is the point,” a line first penned by The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, has become a focal truth in the effort to understand and combat the regime. It’s one thing to be indifferent to human suffering, quite another to find it amusing.
Because much of my life has been spent in pursuit of the joy laughter so often brings, I find the Maga masters’ gleeful production and embrace of jokes about their cruelty particularly gutting. But laughing at the suffering of others – especially “others” – makes them feel connected and strong. It codifies, normalises and justifies their sadism.
In truth, the gleeful guffaws of Trump’s supplicant army are almost always nervous and insincere – indistinguishable from those of 12-year-old boys who laugh at a bully’s unfunny jokes to avoid becoming a target.
That neither Trump nor any of his lieutenants has ever said anything intentionally funny simply illuminates their emptiness in the qualities it takes to be funny: intelligence, awareness, empathy, compassion and other positive human traits.
They’ve been especially giddy and giggly over Alligator Alcatraz, the huge pop-up detention centre in the Florida Everglades surrounded by alligators and pythons, with reports of worms in the food and wastewater on the floors. Consider the comedy stylings of Laura Loomer, Trump’s de facto personnel director: “Alligator lives matter,” she tweeted. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” The White House website has been spewing out hateful attempts at meme humour so ham-handed and lame that Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t find them amusing.
As a relatively powerless individual, I have decided that one thing I can do to rage against the regime is to practise “radical kindness” – seizing opportunities to be kind on your daily travels, especially to those Maga has trained its sadistic sights on. My version often involves a warmly offered joke or three to people I don’t know, because laughter is always best shared, and can’t be without acknowledging each other’s humanity. And it’s long past time to take humour – and our country – back.
