“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.” — Jonathan Swift (Goodreads).
Heard the latest one about President Trump? No? Well, I don’t blame you. There’s so many going around, it’s hard to pick one.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker got into the emerging spirit of the Trump regime the other day with a wisecrack about Lake Michigan, no, make that Lake Illinois, on Chicago’s Channel 5. Who knows? It may become the next big thing on social media, and with a tinpot wannabe dictator grabbing headlines in the White House, we all need a good laugh.
In fact, dark humor and satire have been one of the most effective defenses against real and imagined tyrants, from Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin and Charlie Chaplin’s of Hitler to Aristophanes’ spoof of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Pritzker’s foray into the genre was more peaceful. Channel 5 reported it like this:
llinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced plans Friday to rename Lake Michigan as Lake Illinois and annex Green Bay.
In a seemingly satirical video posted on X, formerly Twitter, the governor revealed he was making “an important announcement.”
“The world’s finest geographers, experts who study the Earth’s natural environment, have concluded a decades-long council and determined that a great lake deserves to be named after a great state. So today, I’m issuing a proclamation declaring that hereinafter, Lake Michigan shall be known as Lake Illinois. The proclamation has been forwarded to Google to ensure the world’s maps reflect this momentous change,” Pritzker revealed.
The “announcement” follows President Donald Trump’s earlier executive orders renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and returning Alaska’s Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. [Links in the original.]
And Pritzker isn’t the only one to find humor in it. I love the Facebook meme that shows a map with a horizontal east-west line from Cuba to central Mexico. South of the line, it reads “Golfo de Mexico”; to the north, “Golfo del Gringo Loco.” In an odd way, Trump is almost too rich a target for satire. In freize, a magazine of the arts based in London, novelist Patrick Langley wrote in 2017 that the real Donald Trump made his satirists look tame by comparison:
Satire thrives on exaggeration. It heightens and distorts its object in order to expose its true nature, offering a funfair mirror in which our leaders’ faults and failings are magnified and scrutinized. Yet Trump’s vulgarity and unfitness for office are glaringly self-evident: he ran the biggest, gaudiest media circus in town. Compounding the brashness of his oratorical style – part court jester, part drunken uncle with an axe to grind – is his cartoonish appearance. That rippling chin, which makes him look like Jabba the Hutt squeezed into an off-the-rack Macy’s suit. That Cheetos-dusted complexion. That gold-plated candyfloss comb over. Finding funny ways to describe Trump has become a national pastime.
Yet, Langley added, satire serves a serious purpose. He quotes Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, who famously said the satirist’s job is “to cure the vices of mankind.” Says Langley:
One definition of satire is that it marries comedy to moral purpose. For centuries, satirists have mobilized laughter in opposition to authoritarianism. In ancient Athens, Aristophanes wrote plays that pilloried the war-mongering populist Cleon, highlighting his violent abuses of power. […] Antony Jay, who co-wrote the satirical British sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister (1980–88), argued that satire heightens viewers’ political awareness. For Jay, the crucial difference between satire and conventional comedy is that it ‘focuses a collective antagonism on political or social issues’, even while it plays those issues for laughs.
Satire cuts two ways. On the one hand, Mel Brooks, who ought to know how it works, once said it’s an effective weapon — perhaps the most effective weapon — against charismatic dictators:
The great thing about dictators is, you have to know, if you get on a soapbox with them, you’re gonna lose, because they have a way of spellbinding with their oratory. But if you can reduce them to ridicule, then you’re way ahead.
But Rudolph Herzog, a filmmaker and author of Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany who quoted Brooks in a 2017 article, says jokes about Nazi leaders “may have contributed to keeping the regime in power.” He explains: “In the claustrophobic confines of Hitler’s dictatorship, people needed to let off steam.” Jokes, he reasons, are a safe way to do that without plotting to overthrow the government.
I’m inclined to argue the issue both ways. I have no reason to doubt Herzog’s analysis of Nazi Germany, but living through the Cold War era as I did with a lively interest in international relations, I grew to appreciate the dark humor of the twilight years of the former Soviet Union. The topic of Russian political jokes even has its own Wikipedia page. Here’s a good example:
A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. “I just heard the funniest joke in the world!” “Well, go ahead, tell me!” says the other judge. “I can’t – I just gave someone ten years for it!”
To British historian and art critic Ben Lewis, late-stage Soviet humor flourished under a special set of conditions:
Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently amusing situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.
This brand of dark humor reached a peak under Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, who was 78 at the time of his death in 1982. One joke targeted his aging memory, and the Soviet gerontocracy of his day in general, with an apocryphal speech that went like this:
“Everyone in the Politburo has dementia. Comrade Pelshe doesn’t recognize himself: I say ‘Hello, comrade Pelshe,’ and he responds ‘Hello, Leonid Ilyich, but I’m not Pelshe.’ Comrade Gromyko is like a child – he’s taken my rubber donkey from my desk. And during comrade Grechko’s funeral – by the way, why is he absent? – nobody but me thought of inviting a lady for a dance when the music started playing.” [Links in the original.]
Does our new absurd, laugh-a-minute reality in America, with a 78-year-old President succeeding a doddering 82-year-old who could no longer effectively communicate, sound familiar? I think it does.
As the Trump regime takes a darker turn with mass layoffs in the federal agencies, the Washington Post reports civil servants are lawyering up and telling jokes. One headline: “Trump’s perceived enemies brace for retribution with plans, dark humor.” The Post reported:
Some are supporting one another in group text messages. There, they commiserate and share contact information for lawyers who could represent them. “There’s dark humor in there, too,” texted one person whose name appeared on [FBI director nominee Kash] Patel’s list of “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters.” [Link in the original.]
Unfortunately, the Post didn’t quote any examples of the dark humor. But Teen Vogue magazine, which offers its young readers a range of surprisingly sophisticated political commentary, did exactly that right after the Nov. 5 election. “Things feel bad,” began a staff editorial two days later. But, “life goes on, and we have to try to make sense of the results we got. One way to do so: humor.”
Memes about Trump’s win circulated on TikTok, X, and Instagram, with users cracking jokes about the grim reality of what the new administration might look like. They took aim at the Democratic Party for fumbling the race by running a “Republican-light” campaign and waiting until July 2024 to push Joe Biden, a deeply unpopular candidate, off the ticket. Gallows humor doesn’t make the sting of the outcome — or the very grave stakes for marginalized communities, women, and students — any less real. Finding a smile or a moment of levity where we can doesn’t hurt though. [Links in the original.]
Among the examples Teen Vogue found on social media:
- “first as farce; then as farce, then once again as farce, then a farce encore” [a play on the saying, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce” attributed to Karl Marx].
- “We should’ve known Trump was gonna win just based on the cultural impact of Hawk Tuah [a brief media phenomenon best known for imitating oral sex on camera].”
- “admittedly im curious what Tap Water 2.0 will taste like under RFK Jr.”
- “your 20s are all about trump being president and that sucks. your 30s are all about trump being president and that sucks.”
Fast forward from November 2024 to February 2025, and we’re back to all-Trump-being-president-all-the-time. And, yes, it sucks.
Take the kerfuffle over the Gulf of Whatchamacallit. Fulfilling a campaign promise, Trump issued an executive order renaming it the “Gulf of America” as soon as he took office. According to an Associated Press explainer, it’s well within the scope of his office to do so “for official U.S. purposes,” and Google Maps and Apple Maps (both headquartered in the US) have followed suit.
But the AP has not, explaining “a global news agency that disseminates news around the world […] must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” This has allowed the Trump regime to milk the spat for added publicity:
“It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Feb. 12. “It’s very important to this administration that we get that right, not just for people here at home, but also for the rest of the world.”
And, of course, the kerfuffle allowed Gov. Pritzker to get some publicity of his own. He even jumped on another Trumpy kerfuffle, speculation about the acquisition of Greenland, by announcing he was annexing Green Bay, Wis. (thereby slipping in an oblique reference to the rivalry between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears). And who can forget el Golfo del Gringo Loco or (another favorite of mine) the Gulf of How Does This Lower the Price of Eggs?
Even the people who make MoonPies, a Southern delicacy consisting largely of a marshmallow stuffing between two graham-cracker like biscuits, got into the act with this deadpan announcement:
To whom it may concern:
Thanks to recent geographical updates, we are excited to announce that the land mass previously known as Florida will now be referred to as MoonPieTown
‘But Florida is a state,’ you say. No, Florida was a state. Now it’s MoonPieTown. We can just do this now!”
Not only is the satire pitch-perfect — it perfectly captures the arbitrary and capricious tone of Trump’s executive order — it ends with a perfect sales pitch, as it closes with “Please continue to enjoy our delicious marshmallow sandwiches and don’t think too much about it.”
That just might be good advice for all of us.
But there’s one more wrinkle here. and I think it’s crucial. It was expressed — perfectly! — by Desi Lydic of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, who has a better grasp of the political moment than most of the cable TV commentariat. Shortly after the November election, she said the pundits miss the boat when they try to diagnose what’s wrong with Trump — “he’s a dictator, he’s a fascist, he’s a malignant narcissist,” and so on. Instead, she suggested, we should look closer to home:
It’s pretty clear that America is the one that needs the diagnosis, because whatever is wrong with him, we f**king love it. In this moment Donald Trump is holding up a mirror to the American people. And it might be time to take a good f**king hard look.
Satire, to quote Wikipedia, is a genre “in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule.” But there’s more to it than just yukking it up over foolishness in high places, “Although satire is usually meant to be humorous,” adds the unusually perceptive Wikipedia page, “its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.” Lydic was reminding us of nothing less than the moral purpose of satire.
If you lose sight of that moral purpose, as far as I’m concerned, you’re no longer doing satire. In fact when Plato was asked to recommend a book that best explained the society of ancient Athens, he recommended the satires of Aristophanes. If I were asked to recommend a commentator who best explains the America of 2025, I think I’d recommend Desi Lydic.
Links and Citations
Todd Feurer, “Trolling Trump, Pritzker jokingly renames Lake Michigan, annexes Green Bay,” CBS News, Feb,. 7, 2025 https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/jb-pritzker-donald-trump-joke-lake-michigan-lake-illinois-annex-green-bay/.
“Gov. Pritzker jokes he’s renaming Lake Michigan, annexing Green Bay,” WMAQ-TV, Channel 5 Chicago, Feb.7, 2025 https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/gov-pritzker-jokes-hes-renaming-lake-michigan-annexing-green-bay/3668802/.
Meg Kinnard, The White House says it’s a ‘fact’ that the Gulf of Mexico has been renamed. Is that right?,” Associated Press, Feb. 13, 2025 https://apnews.com/article/trump-gulf-of-mexico-bc438f4feca1234475a1adef99344da7.
“Memes About Trump’s Win Make Light of the Dark Election Results,” Teen Vogue, Nov. 7, 2024 https://www.teenvogue.com/story/memes-trump-win.
Patrick Langley, “Gallows Humour,” frieze, Feb. 10 2017 https://www.frieze.com/article/gallows-humour.
Matt Stopera, “MoonPie Has Renamed The State Of Florida, And Everyone Is Loving It,” Yahoo! News, Feb. 12, 2025 https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/moonpie-renaming-state-florida-suggestion-200431482.html.
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Sarah Ellison, Patrick Marley and Holly Bailey, “Trump’s perceived enemies brace for retribution with plans, dark humor,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2025 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/28/trump-retribution-preparation-election-officials/.
[Uplinked Feb. 14, 2025]
Ordinary Time 