Satire Briefing Paper I

Jenna DePellegrini and Christina McAlister

Oftentimes, the American public turns to comedy to escape their harsh and stressful reality. This holds especially true during a pandemic, and even more so during an election year. But, what happens when comedy and politics intersect? Trevor Noah jokes about how the Republican National Convention is “[t]he place where Facebook comments come to life.” From covering the RNC and the Kenosha riots to endeavoring to explain just how we ended up in our current predicament(s), the current political environment surrounding the upcoming election has made even the funniest of satire comedic into exasperated hosts as they attempt to analyze, rationalize, and humorize current events.

One thing the majority of political satirists can agree on is the United States is undergoing one of the biggest social calls for change and civil rights activism that we’ve seen in our history. But as discussed in our previous class, what is being portrayed and how Americans are perceiving the events around them is based on a combination of the media content they’re viewing and the confirmation bias that is being served on both sides of the political divide. John Oliver described the theme of the 2020 Republican National Convention as “telling lies in front of flags.” According to an episode of Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, 41% of Americans think the Civil War was caused by non-slavery issues, and Trevor Noah cites that the majority of Republicans “think of racism as less of a systemic problem and more of a personal obstacle on the way to a personal triumph.” All joking aside, these comedians did speak to some truth when pointing out how the speakers at the RNC seamlessly glossed over racism in America. As discussed in class, voters are witnessing Trump run on a “law and order” campaign. The RNC further reinforced this idea that Trump is the only candidate that can stop America’s civil unrest by having most speakers claim that racism is not a threat, despite Democrats saying the opposite.

As always, these political commentators had their fun with Trump as they took jabs at him falling through with his 2016 campaign promises, his RNC speech, and his refusal to address the pandemic at hand. John Oliver pointed out that Trump’s border wall was supposed to define him as a president, which it did. Even though there is no wall, Oliver joked that this failed promise defines his presidency as “destructive, ineffective, weak, racist, and long-lasting damage.” Trevor Noah on The Daily Show said that Trump’s speech at the RNC was a “boring low-energy Jeb Bush-ass speech” and felt like a “17 minute Ben Carson impersonation.” Both Oliver and Noah noted that Trump kept referring to COVID-19 in the past tense and Noah also brought up how “[i]n many ways, this is Trump’s response to coronavirus in a nutshell. His top priority isn’t health or safety-- his top priority is making Donald Trump look good.”

These satirists also analyzed and provided commentary on the 2020 RNC and Kenosha riots, claiming that both of these events were symbols of what our country has become and what it might look like in the future if our partisan divide continues or worse, grows bigger. After watching Kimberly Guilfoyle’s “rousing” speech at the Republican Convention, wherein she claimed,“the best is yet to come,” John Oliver passionately concluded that this statement and others made at the Convention sound “like a fu*king threat.” And after analyzing the “misleading portrait” Republicans portrayed during the convention, Oliver concluded that these various speeches and dialogue made about race were mainly intended to reassure white people that they could vote Republican without being racist; or, going back to what we discussed in class, Trump and his strategists were giving these white, suburban voters permission to vote Republican with a clear conscience.

When dissecting the political strategies and images of the Trump campaign and political party, Hasan Minhaj pointed out how these current political and social events are the result of a more fundamental problem of our political and governmental system. In his episode titled “We’re Doing Elections Wrong,” Minhaj criticized the way the United States decides elections; with our Winner Take All System, a candidate doesn’t need a majority to win-- they only need a plurality of votes or more votes than any other candidate on the ballot. The result is a two-party system wherein “mega parties” cover wide tents of constituents who vote for the candidate they least dislike (sound familiar?). Thus, voting third-party is seen as “wasting a vote” and others who aren’t completely moderate in their parties are forced to conform and rally behind a single candidate; they compromise their values, forcing the American constituent to compromise on theirs.

The result of our Winner Take All System was seen at the 2016 RNC, in which President Trump never got a majority vote for the convention nomination; he got a plurality vote that correlates to only 5.5 percent of all eligible voters voting for him at the convention. “Republicans hated Trump,” Minhaj said. “But they hated Democrats more, so they fell in line,” even if they heavily opposed his nomination before (Senator Lindsey Graham, we’re looking at you). The cumulation of these events is the growth of negative partisanship, or the tendency of some voters to form their political opinions primarily in opposition to political parties they dislike. And as every satirist claims, President Trump has exasperated and made this divide worse than ever before. By disguising racial panic and encouraging “the blatant double-standard in American society between how we treat white and black people,” The Trump administration is encouraging fear-mongering and the social unrest we see now. “They think of racism as less of a systemic problem and more of a personal obstacle on the way to a personal triumph,” and are “pushing Republicans to far-right extremes” that encourage voters to adopt the Trump platform.

John Oliver said it best: “Real discomfort is the only way we’re going to bring about real change… and [T]he RNC shows that where we still might end up going is genuinely terrifying.” The Electoral System enforces and empowers this extremism, and Democrats are going to need to win over way more votes to tackle their geographic disadvantage. Democrats need broad appeal to win, but broad appeal might not be enough in this election or create real change in a system that has been “built to be unresponsive.”