Trump bombed…the audience

I watched the late night yucksters like Jon Stewart and Seth Meyers get a bunch of cheap guffaws out of Trump’s supposedly inept attempt at comedy at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But Trump’s performance was at a level that took him a step above comic geniuses, beyond even Andy Kaufman and Lenny Bruce.

Throughout the evening, President Donald Trump mangled one lame-ass joke after another. The audience of not-too-clever journalists didn’t get it, while Trump was enjoying every minute of it, holding them captive, as he assaulted them with deliberately unfunny jokes he pretended he hadn’t seen before. The performance was dragged out with what-the-hell-is-he-talking-about bitching and complaining.

Every time a joke face-planted, he would comment on it, “Who the hell wrote this?…Is this funny? …  Who the hell would think this is funny?,” even pretending he doesn’t get his own punch lines.

This is known as a meta-performance, the highest level of conceptual humor.

Note that while he kept commenting on his own dumber-than-dirt jokes, he deliciously ripped into an audience that he knew was horrified, offended and bored — and that he held in chains for 63 tortured minutes. Trump was never happier. 

Did you look at his face? Trump took Lenny Bruce’s schtick of literally urinating on the audience to the next level.

I will say that Jon Stewart got at least half the joke. The Daily Show maven moaned that it was disgusting to watch The High and Mighty Press, supposedly independent investigators of Trump’s perfidy, scarfing up his dishes of rubbery chicken, but refusing to get up and walk out, like they were imprisoned in a hellish bad-joke Guantánamo.

Stewart railed against a media bending a knee to The Power. Even the name, “White House Correspondents’ Dinner” bespeaks fealty and fawning. If the job of a journalist is, “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,” Trump captured on video tape the preening of the privileged “reporters,” millionaires who got their jobs because of capped, gleaming teeth, $1200 hair-cuts and bodies sculpted by personal trainers, comforting the comfortable. Here was hard evidence that they are all members of the same club, the comfortable chumming it up with the very comfortable.

Trump trumps Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman

Trump’s most brilliant joke of the evening was in personally handing awards to the Wall Street Journal reporters who were honored for discovering a dirty little postcard he drew for Jeffrey Epstein. Trump had sued them for $2 billion.

Yet, here they were, lined up to shake Trump’s purple, puffy hand. Every single one of them smiled at him with giant shit-eating grins and said, “Thank you!” and even laughed at his little private jokes. Jon Stewart wanted to puke, but I’d already done that for him.

Stewart nailed it. American reporters will always dance for the king when he pays them to dance. Payment in chicken and “access.”

The Daily Show got close to the real story here. Not that Donald Trump is no stand-up comic, as if anyone thought he was, but how Trump successfully humiliated the so-called “free and independent” Press by showing that their idea of a big story is a nasty birthday card.  

The Wall Street Journal, pre-Murdoch ownership, broke the superlative Enron story. It’s now reduced to sniffing Epstein’s pee-pee and calling it investigate reporting.

Dreadful, cringey comic Tony Clifton (Andy Kaufman 1949-1984).

Trump followed in the tradition of the best of the best: not just Lenny Bruce, but the inimitable Andy Kaufman who famously did stand-up as the pathetically unfunny Latka Gravas or as Tony Clifton telling the cringy-est, most offensive and humorless jokes, pathetically commenting on his own terrible performance — then berating the audience for not laughing, then begging their forgiveness for his lack of talent.  

Kaufman was building on the breathtakingly innovative work of his partner, performance artist Laurie Anderson.

Meta-humor took off with Lenny Bruce at the ‘hungry i’ in San Francisco, when his entire performance was reading a chapter of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. No one laughed, until they finally got it. 

Profanity police: Comedian Lenny Bruce, arrested for obscenity (San Francisco, CA – October 4, 1961).

Trump’s takedown of the press simpletons was no less than an outré waterboarding of the TV poodles who fought to get invited to this ridiculous and shameful bacchanal of self-regard. All so they could quaff champagne with Stephen Miller and other comic luminaries of the Administration.

When I started at The Guardian, I turned down an invitation to Bill Clinton’s second Inaugural Ball. I don’t break bread with my targets, with the powerful, unless I’m setting them up for a hidden-recording pantsing. 

So, while it deeply hurts me to say it, I give The Donald a standing ovation for the most effective, memorable and consequential performance art acts of this century. The closet comparator is Accusing the Audience, the avant-garde one-act by Nobel Prize laureate Peter Handke. 

I hope those reporters who enthusiastically thanked the President woke up the next day realizing that his Epsteinian handshake got them pregnant without Vaseline. 

And I hope America woke up the next day realizing that the Fourth Estate has turned into Trump Real Estate.

And bravo to Jon Stewart, who, while he didn’t get the real joke, exposed the so-called Press for playing piano in the whorehouse. For that, Stewart deserves a Pulitzer.

Our most original comics, Bruce, Stewart, Fanny Bryce, Andersen, Kaufman, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Seth Rogen, all Jewish, have been held back by their Borscht Belt roots and tribal pain. They must have watched, from Heaven or here, with awe as this orange-stained bloviating bigot — a shaygets schmuck no less! — reach comedy escape velocity to grab the Holy Grail of meta-humorists, when all the jokes are on the audience itself, and the audience doesn’t get it.

Trump “bombed” alright. He bombed the audience.