Should politicians be funny? (w/ Mike Birbiglia)
"At seven, it's marginal, right?"
It’s the first NST episode of the year, and we’ve got a special one for you today.
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Recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been on social media mocking Donald Trump by, well, sounding exactly like Donald Trump. You know the style: ALL CAPS POSTS, random Capitalization, and quotation marks around words that don’t “need” them.
Gavin’s behavior certainly seems to resonate with the resistance liberal crowd, but it got me thinking about the use of humor in politics in general. Is this a worthwhile political strategy, or just noise that doesn’t actually help much?
To find out, I spoke to humor historian Mark Rolfe of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who taught us a bunch about how humor was employed throughout American political history. Then, I had a conversation with comedian Mike Birbiglia of the Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast, who had some thoughts on the politician jokes found below.
And here's Amy Klobuchar’s joke.
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I think you're missing something about Kamala not going on podcasts like Rogan. A female politician's humor isn't going to be heard by that audience the same way a male politician's would. It's a venue for men and men's humor, in a field (politics) that has been dominated by men. If Kamala went on those shows and acted the same way the men did, it would be judged differently than male politicians would. And god help her if she didn't laugh at a man's joke... then she'd be seen as a bitch.
Humor is a more dangerous field for women than it is for men. So is anger and outrage. The populous judges women who express these emotions differently than they would men. Why expose yourself to that risk? As you said in the podcast, we know she can be funny. We've heard it. My friends think I'm funny. Joe Rogan's crowd would not. I don't find Joe Rogan funny. I sure as hell wouldn't go on Joe Rogan if my goal was to share my humorous side.
I recently watch a Chappell special. Then I watched a Birbiglia special. I tried to think about why I found Birbiglia so much funnier, and I think it's because Chappell's humor comes from his joy in owning power. He punches down. Like Trump. I don't find a lot of humor in taking down those with less power than I have. I don't think many female comedians use that tool, and I suspect it's because women who are punching down are called bitches or Karens. And if you want to get elected as a woman, you don't want to be thought of as a bitch or a Karen.
Anyway, you do good work. But you needed a woman on this show.
I think it could have been better to find the entire context of Vance's "joke." I found the entire speech here: https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2024/senator-jd-vance-campaigns-in-middletown-ohio/645126
It sounds like he was starting to talk about Democratic complaints that voter ID laws are racist then diverged into the Mt Dew comment and talked about how people in the front row were joking about something. Could have been an inside joke? Also I believe this was his first speech and public appearance after being named the VP candidate.