The Joke's On Us

The joke makers think they're clever. They spend days cooking up zingers that land like wet firecrackers. All that effort for a fizzle.

Take Obama's speechwriters. They huddled for hours, crafting the perfect dig about Trump's fixation on size. When Obama delivered the line with a suggestive hand gesture, his former staffers couldn't wait to brag about it on their podcast. As if we care how that dick sausage gets made.

Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett—names that mean nothing to most people (Favreau and Lovett aren’t the stocky dudes from Swingers and The Critic, respectively). But they're patting themselves on the back like they just cured cancer. "It was in the moment," they claim. Sure it was, boys. And I'm the Queen of England.

Then there's Hillary Clinton's social media team. Back in 2016, they thought they struck gold when she tweeted at Donald Trump to "Delete your account." Three words that took a team of consultants to come up with. They probably popped champagne when it racked up 420,000 retweets.

These jokes require too much effort for too little payoff. Clinton's team even admitted they teed up tweets hours before her speeches, assuming Trump would take the bait. It's like watching a cat wait all day by a mouse hole, only to pounce on its own tail.

The humor's long gone out of the 2024 election, anyway. Used to be you could count on a politician for a good laugh, even if it was unintentional: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is." This year, the RNC was a lot of septuagenarian Hulk Hogan flexing and the DNC’s been little more than carefully-scripted one-liners and focus-grouped putdowns. About as entertaining as a funeral, the lot of it.

Trump, for all his faults, knew how to work social media in his heyday. He'd fire off banger tweets in the wee hours that would dominate the news cycle for days. No team of writers, just pure, unfiltered id. Love him or hate him, the guy had a knack for getting attention.

But that was then. Now he’s retweeting fake Taylor Swift endorsements and we're stuck with left-liberal politicians trying to be comedians, and failing miserably. Obama's hand gestures, the Kamala Harris coconut tree memes, and Clinton's clap-backs feel as outdated as vaudeville routines.

It's not just that the jokes aren't funny. It's that they're trying so hard to be funny. We get it, you want to be the cool candidate. But cool died the moment all of you career politicians started chasing it.

Remember when Tim “Daddy” Kaine couldn’t even come up with a favorite dad joke on the spot, and instead said something like, “Being a dad is too serious to joke about?” That lack of witty repartee is for the best. We shouldn't be voting based on who cracks the best jokes or has the snappiest comebacks. That's how we ended up with a reality TV star in the White House.

People ought to look at what the candidates are actually offering. Student loan forgiveness. Tax cuts. Infrastructure projects. The boring stuff that affects people's lives—crunch the numbers and vote for whoever will save you and people like you a couple hundred bucks or ship some patronage your way. Unfortunately, that sort of cold hard calculus doesn't make for viral tweets or trending hashtags.

It's a long way to Election Day. Maybe the Democrats come up with a zinger that actually lands. Maybe Trump rediscovers his “nipples protruding” prime as a poster. Maybe we all wise up and start focusing on the issues that matter.

But I wouldn't bet on it. This is America. We love a good show. And right now, the show's looking pretty stale. A bunch of goofs and party hacks trading barbs that wouldn't cut it at a middle-school lunch table. Makes you long for the days when politicians just kissed babies on the lips, shook hands, and sent bagmen like Gaston Means to collect the graft.

At least then they weren't trying to be comedians. Leave that to the professionals. Politics is already enough of a geriatric freak show without the phoned-in act.