Vol. 133: Trump and Putin walk into a bar…

The case for humor in trying times

My column last week, which spoofed the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, has been attacked from two sides.

On the one hand are folks who say Trump is no laughing matter— that this is an autocrat bent on destroying our checks and balances, rewarding the rich, punishing the poor, locking immigrants in cages, throttling critics, abusing women, cheating at golf, yadda yadda yadda.

At the other extreme are those who scold me for ridiculing the most remarkable human to walk the planet since Benjamin Franklin, or at least George W. Bush. A man who’s fearlessly chopping payrolls, slashing taxes, imposing tariffs, and deporting aliens. All this in addition to his full-time job running a chain of golf resorts. When, they ask, will I write something favorable about Trump instead of making jokes about him?

They’re both right. This is no time for humor. Trump is a serious man who deserves serious treatment. So, from now on I pledge to…. Excuse me for a moment.

(Bwaaaa hahahaha!)

Sorry about that. What can I tell you? The guy just cracks me up. But let me explain where I’m coming from.

Mike Royko’s advice

In the late 1960s I was a Chicago reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I also got involved with the Chicago Journalism Review, a monthly created after the infamous 1968 Democratic convention by young idealistic Chicago journalists to report the stories they couldn’t tell in their own newspapers, and also to tell the public how media institutions operate.

What drove CJR was not any profit motive, but passion and anger. But one of my first journalistic heroes, the Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko, had astutely perceived that “Anger wears thin quickly, but humor is always welcome.” After CJR’s first six issues, it occurred to me that there was maybe a little too much anger spilling out of its pages. So, I began submitting parodies of prominent local newspaper columnists (Royko included).

At first, CJR’s editors weren’t quite sure what to do with something that purported to be funny. But they finally squeezed one of my parodies onto the back page, and to everyone’s surprise the reader response was enthusiastic. Soon my parodies became a monthly staple on CJR’s back page; they even came to be regarded as status symbols among Chicago journalists, some of whom actually lobbied me to satirize their columns. Although CJR’s circulation never exceeded 12,000, those parodies– for which I was paid nothing– rendered me a minor celebrity in Chicago, something my byline at the Journal (circulation 1.2 million) never accomplished.

Wiping the slate clean

“Comedy is a weird but beautiful thing,” Mel Brooks observed in his 2021 memoir, All About Me! “Even though it seems foolish and silly and crazy, comedy has the most to say about the human condition. Because if you can laugh, you can get by. You can survive when things are bad if you have a sense of humor.”

The late Philadelphia civic leader W. Thatcher Longstreth was more specific in his 1990 memoir, Main Line Wasp (full disclosure: I was Thacher’s co-author):

“In my own business life, each day is like a blackboard filled with annoyance and frustration– a phone call from somebody who’s rude to you; a customer’s refusal to return your phone calls; your subsequent discovery that the customer isn’t going to give you the order he promised you last week; your wife phoning you with some domestic problem at home, furious because you forgot to get something that you promised her you would get; or a call from the teacher at school to tell you that your kid is going to flunk if he doesn’t shape up, and why don’t you spend more time with your children and less time on that ridiculous job?

“But then somebody phones and tells you a funny story, or a friend or associate comes in with some ridiculous situation, and you start to laugh, you get laughing, hard, and the next thing you know, it’s as if the whole slate is clean– you took an eraser and wiped off the whole thing. All the discouraging impact of a dozen little annoyances is gone; it’s as if you’re starting all over again. To me, that touch of humor has always been the leavening force of my life.”

Where is that bastard?

G.K. Chesterton, the English novelist and Christian apologist, put it this way: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.”

Or consider late three-term Republican Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, who died this year at 93. Simpson stood out from his colleagues not for his conservative principles but for his sense of humor. Soon after his arrival in Washington, the Washington Post noted, “Simpson turns out to be one of the most refreshing breezes that occasionally gentles their way through Congressional pomp and fustian to remind that all is not lost.” The Senator, the paper said, would sometimes answer his own phone. Once, when a caller asked, “Where is that skinny bastard?” he replied, “Speaking.”

For me, at least, the lesson of these examples is: Find humor in any situation, no matter how dire. War in Ukraine? Starvation in Gaza? Laura Loomer in the White House? The challenge is to find something funny, because that’s the only way most people will pay attention.

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Donald Trump.

Slavery in Florida

Last Tuesday, less than 24 hours after my satirical column about Jeffrey Epstein appeared, Trump explained why he broke off his friendship with Epstein. It had nothing to do with the fact that Epstein was a creep and a sexual predator, Trump insisted. On the contrary, Trump said, Epstein "stole" young women who worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa.

"People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone," Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he returned from Scotland to Washington. "And other people would come and complain, 'This guy is taking people from the spa.’ I didn't know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.' I don't want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again, and I said, 'Out of here’."

I know what you’re thinking, so I double-checked: Despite the best efforts of Governor Ron DeSantis, slavery remains illegal in Florida, at least for the time being. So those women who left Trump’s spa for Epstein’s spa must have departed of their own free will.

Let that sink in for a moment: The employees of the Mar-a-Lago spa, given a choice between working for Trump and working for the world’s most notorious slimeball, chose the slimeball.

I’m not making this up. (Although maybe Trump is.)

Here’s the bottom line: As Senator Joni Ernst recently reassured Iowans kvetching about Trump’s Medicaid cuts: "We are all going to die,” with or without Medicaid. And in that case, why not put on a happy face for whatever few years— months? weeks?— you have left?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com