Two of the most mordant videos from the Trump era were clipped from the real world. In one, the camera zooms on the pained face of Chris Christie as he stands behind Donald Trump, staring into the abyss on the night of Super Tuesday. In the other, Sean Spicer excavates a new low for White House press briefings with his “Holocaust centers” riff.
The first video is set to the credits of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The second is set to the credits of Veep.
What’s funny about these videos is that they’re examples of reality satirizing the fictional world, rather than the other way around. This kind of turnabout has frustrated South Park co-creator Trey Parker about the direction of his show. In February, Parker lamented that “satire has become reality,” and “what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with.” He reiterated the point to the Los Angeles Times last week—and used it to criticize the quality of South Park’s twentieth season. “We fell into the same trap that Saturday Night Live fell into, where it was like, ‘Dude, we’re just becoming CNN now.’ We’re becoming: ‘Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump,’” he said. “Matt [Parker] and I hated it but we got stuck in it somehow.”
But this conventional wisdom has been gelling for a long time. Back in December of 2015 the Economist—which is as conventional as wisdom gets—proclaimed that “Jokes about Donald Trump aren’t funny anymore.” What was true then is true now, in many cases—only more so as the jokes have gotten older.
Comedy, however, is just one part of the creative industry. Look elsewhere in the entertainment business for similar complaints. Over the last year, musicians have composed scores of songs in response to Trump. The music hasn’t been genre specific: It ranges from indie to the kind of mainstream pop included in “Our First 100 Days” to hip-hop, getting as frank as YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT.”
And yet with all this output, a dean of protest music like Joan Baez says there hasn’t been a breakthrough anthem. “People are waiting for a ‘We Shall Overcome,’ they’re waiting for another ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Imagine.’ Hasn’t been written yet,” she said in April.
Not that major recording artists haven’t been trying. Kendrick Lamar, perhaps by critical acclamation America’s best rapper, wrote in “The Heart Part 4,” Donald Trump is a chump / Know how we feel, punk? Tell ’em that God comin’ / And Russia need a replay button / Y’all up to somethin’.” If K-Dot can’t do it, then perhaps it simply can’t be done.
Trump resistors have tried other mediums, often looking to the past. Orwell’s 1984 has seen a resurgence, as has The West Wing, which is suddenly listed among the top streaming programs on Netflix. And then there’s the original art. Or, maybe that’s “art.”
“There are lines between protest, satire and art,” Griselda Murray Brown wrote in the Financial Times. “Illma Gore’s nude drawing of Trump with a micro-penis may have drawn threats from Trump’s legal team after it went viral last year—but that didn’t make it good art.”
Making good art is hard. And maybe President Trump has made it harder for art to be both good and original. If so, that’s just one more thing the creative community can resent him for.
