In which, thanks to the AI in the reptile hive mind, the pond has a Killer time ...

 

As expected on a Thursday, the contumelious and contemptuous (hat tip to correspondent) petulant Peta was gung ho for genocide and was in the much desired far right t'op of the lizard Oz world ma' position of the digital edition ...

The pond dragged out the red card and left it to the infallible Pope to provide a comment ...

The pond was exhausted by the killing fields and went looking for an alternative below the fold ...

AI! The pond hadn't done AI before, and that meant the pond could safely ignore the rest of the riff raff, not least simpleton Simon rabbiting away in standard reptile ratbag way about the vision thing ...

Besides, briefly, yesterday, Tansy had herself been in the sweet top of the lizard Oz digital world far right position ...

The pond is inclined to think that as well this is the first time ever that Tansy has made an appearance in the pond and so introductions are in order ...

Ah, a one time cardigan wearer, that explains much, and now on to unwoke AI ...

If nothing else, Tansy's deploying of "woke" won her the usual pond prize, currently a tad devalued by the number of reptiles who have won it ...

Now on with the rest of the AI science, and warning, there will be a mention of sweet, innocent, virginal, dinkum Oz coal ...

Global warming? Climate change? Climate science? Pshaw, don't give Tansy or the pond any of that nonsense. You're probably one of those bloody bleeding heart do gooders crying over the octopi when all they're really good for is a serve of calamari, and probably blathering on about the need for the World Bank to take a quantum leap to tackle the alleged climate crisis ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted Tansy's coal fever with a snap of Monsieur King in full regalia...

... then it was back to Tansy for another AI dollop featuring said King...

Golly, the pond can remember the good old days when somebody sidled up to you and said one word: plastics! There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? And sure enough we now have the oceans saturated in plastics. But where's the harm, right? Everything causes some kind of harm right?

Not great on AI so far, but the pond is bullish and has every confidence Tansy will end on a ripper high ...

"Produce alpha for our clients"! Ripper ...and can we fuck the planet too, that'd be pure alpha gibberish ...

And now a complaint regarding the reptiles' presentation of Mein Gott. 

He's always out of synch with the pond's business hours, and yet he too had infinite wisdom regarding AI, and Mein Gott, the pond savours every word he scribbles.

The reptiles even went to iStock to produce a first-rate graphic ...

For some reason typical of the pond's dissociative thinking,  the pond was reminded of that illustration for that old Colin Wilson book ...

Never mind, Mein Gott was on his usual roll ...

For those unable to read, the reptiles littered Mein Gott's piece with significant snaps that helped explain everything ...

Mein Gott, with snaps like that, there's hardly any need for words, but Mein Gott had plenty ...

Mein Gott, politically correct agendas? Whatever happened to the cane, that splendid instrument that kept law 'n orda in Tamworth Primary and Tamworth High? The pond understands the Xian Brothers preferred a leather strap, but whatever, a well-aimed piece of chalk, or if heavier artillery was required, a chalk board duster, could produce a result, while the pond can personally testify that a smack across the chops from a Dominican nun was most effective ...at generating a life long sense of injustice and grievance. (And let's not forget a sharp rap over the knuckles with a steel ruler, though sadly sometimes in a cheap-arsed school you'd have to go wooden).

Mein Gott, as usual the pond had wandered off down memory lane and was missing the AI point ...

Mein Gott, it was inspirational stuff, and then Mein Gott had to go and ruin it all, with his last few lines ...

The Canadians? Mein Gott, they were completely useless,  a complete joke. This very day Jack the Insider was explaining how useless they were ...

Yep, Jack was in full Dame Groan mode ...

But it wasn't just Jack. Every reptile worth his salt knew that Canucks were a complete woke joke, as bad as the fush and chup folk, and not even suitable as a location for a Tolkein adaptation ...

And it wasn't just the IPA ... Mein Gott, anytime you saw a Canadian, it was a woke joke ...

Mein Gott, does Mein Gott want to the reptiles of the lizard Oz to look to the Canadians? What's happened to the world?

As a bonus, and as a distraction, and as the orange Jesus has been mentioned yet again, the pond turned to Killer Creighton for some light comedy for a closer ...

Did the reptiles think that everybody had forgotten the correct way to look at the sun, whether during an eclipse or at any other time?

Never mind, Killer thought this response was vastly amusing ...

As usual, the real comedy came from Faux Noise ...

Everybody had fun with it, from Stewart to Colbert, featured in rags as diverse as Vanity Fair and Mother Jones, and producing much Xing, with the punchline invariably featuring the night ...

In short ...

Sorry, back to Killer and his deep love of the orange Jesus's comedy stylings, which many confuse with the ramblings of a man in his dotage, showing early signs of dementia ...

Yep, it's great for the 'toons, a small price to pay when you can think of the laughs you can get crossing the country in search of medical relief or while buying shares ...

And so to Killer's last killing them in the aisles, and on the planet, and snake oil taking another plunge gobbet ...

And by golly Killer has done his bit with another Killer piece ... and as usual, the reptiles simply refuse to provide a link, and it was by Michael Kruse and unlike Killer's piece, it was outside the paywall, In on the Joke: The Comedic Trick Trump Uses to Normalize His Behavior ...

It goes without saying that it was vastly more amusing than Killer, and it had also been, in Killer style, misrepresented by Killer ...

“A dollop of humor makes the anti-establishment rage go down,” as the writer Noah Berlatsky wrote in 2020 for Foreign Policy in a piece headlined “Fascists Know How to Turn Mockery Into Power. ” “Horseplay is necessary,” believed Joseph Goebbels, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest, most loyal advisers and the Nazis’ top propagandist. “Mussolini,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen, told me, referring to 20th-century Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor” as Trump. And stenograms of Communist Party and Politburo meetings in the era of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union show no shortage of notations of laughter — from jokes made at the expense of somebody about to be on the outs to a sort of forced or sycophantic fun. “There’s a lot,” Maya Vinokour, a scholar of Stalinism, told me, “and that even ends up being true as the purges start.”

Trump is not Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini. But they share a rhetorical style, experts say. That’s because the humor is not a bug. “It’s a feature of demagoguery,” Vinokour explained. “Laughter is going to be a weapon, because you laugh at something to diminish it and as preparation for casting it down or destroying it,” she said. “So I don’t think that Trump could get away with just fearmongering. I think he has to punctuate it with moments of levity.”

“It’s such a huge part of his movement,” Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the Fascist Creep and a member of the executive committee of the Far Right Analysis Network, told me. “It is a way of inverting and reversing assumptions in a carnivalesque kind of way. It’s a way of upending morality,” he said. “It’s a thing that gives him permission to go on the attack in really hostile ways while saving face as just sort of an old satirist or something.”

“He doesn’t cry and say, ‘My God, they’ve indicted me more times than Al Capone! Can you believe they indicted me more than Al Capone?’” Alan Marcus, a former Trump consultant and publicist in the ’90s, told me. “He gets them to join him in his denigration of the system,” he said. “He uses it to minimize his shortcomings and maximize his bond with the audience.”

The Capone crack is especially instructive. By analogizing himself to a notoriously murderous mobster, by calling actual attention to the volume of the criminality with which he is charged, but by doing it in the context of jokes, Trump diminishes the unprecedented enormity of the accusations against him — that he tried to overturn an election, fomented a deadly insurrection and concealed national security documents — while convincing his followers that what’s plainly so serious can’t be serious at all.

Fintan O’Toole, the accomplished Irish critic and polemicist, just published an excellent essay about this in the New York Review of Books — exploring the almost magical way comedy, in the hands of an actor like Trump, can normalize the abnormal, lessen the monstrous and offer audiences a sinister kind of license.

As elsewhere on the intertubes, Kruse provided any number of links, including one to that Fintan O'Toole piece in the NYRB ...

The pond can never tell if a NYRB reference is inside or outside the paywall, so here's the opening as a sampler as a way of making up for exposing Killer to sunlight yet again...

In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place:

"Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand."

Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing that cannot be taken away from those who are about to be hanged, the final death-defying assertion of human dignity and freedom. And the hangmen don’t get the jokes. Fascists don’t understand humor.

There is great consolation in these thoughts. Yet is it really true that fascists don’t get humor? Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, xenophobic, antidisabled, and antiqueer jokes have always been used to dehumanize those who are being victimized. The ghetto humor that Berg recorded was a way of keeping self-pity at bay. But as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes can also be a way of shutting down pity itself by identifying those who are being laughed at as the ones not worthy of it: “A saving in pity is one of the most frequent sources of humorous pleasure.” Humor, as in Berg’s description, may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun.

Around the time that Berg was writing her diary, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were pointing to the relationship between Nazi rallies and this kind of comedy. The rally, they suggested, was an arena in which a release that was otherwise forbidden was officially permitted:

The anti-Semites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is organized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are fundamentally the same thing.

Donald Trump is not a Nazi, and his followers are (mostly) not fascists. But it is not hard to see how this description resonates with his campaign appearances. Trump is America’s biggest comedian. His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people’s idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear, and resentment entertaining.

For anyone who questions how much talent and charisma this requires, there is a simple answer: Ron DeSantis. Why did DeSantis’s attempt to appeal to Republican voters as a straitlaced version of Trump fall so flat? Because Trumpism without the cruel laughter is nothing. It needs its creator’s fusion of rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation, whether of a reporter with a disability or (in a dumb show that Trump has been playing out in his speeches in recent months) of Joe Biden apparently unable to find his way off a stage. It demands the withering scorn for Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary, Crazy Liz and Ron DeSanctimonious, Cryin’ Chuck and Phoney Fani. It requires the lifting of taboos to create a community of kindred spirits. It depends on Trump’s ability to be pitiless in his ridicule of the targets of his contempt while allowing his audience to feel deeply sorry for itself. (If tragedy, as Aristotle claimed, involves terror and pity, Trump’s tragicomedy deals in terror and self-pity.)

Spoiler alert: O'Toole ended this way ...

...Part of the dissonance is that Trump’s stand-up routine is completely dependent on the idea that he and his audience most despise: political correctness. Like much of the worst of contemporary comedy, Trump both amuses and thrills his audience by telling them that he is saying what he is not allowed to say. “Beautiful women,” he said at the rally in South Carolina after pointing to a group of female superfans in the audience. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore, but I’ll say it…. That usually is the end of a career, but I’ll say it.” There are so many layers to a moment like this: the idea that the woke mob is stopping manly men from complimenting attractive women, a sideways nod toward the “pussygate” tapes that should have ended Trump’s political career but didn’t, a dig at the Me Too movement, a reiteration of Trump’s right to categorize women as “my type” or “not my type,” the power of the leader to lift prohibitions—not just for himself but, in this carnivalesque arena of utopian freedom, for everyone in the audience.

Flirting with the unsayable has long been part of his shtick. If we go all the way back to May 1992 to watch Trump on Letterman’s show, there is a moment when Trump silently mouths the word “shit.” He does this in a way that must have been practiced rather than spontaneous—it takes some skill to form an unspoken word so clearly for a TV audience that everyone immediately understands it. Letterman plays his straight man: “You ain’t that rich, Don, you can’t come on here and say that.” But of course Trump did not “say” it. A sympathetic audience loves a moment like this because it is invited to do the transgressive part in its head. It gets the pleasure of filling in the blank.

Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion. Consider a televised speech Trump gave at the Al Smith Dinner, hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in October 2016, near the end of the presidential campaign. The dinner, held to raise money for Catholic charities, is traditionally the last occasion on which the two main presidential candidates share a stage—Hillary Clinton was also present. Trump deadpanned that he knew he would have a receptive audience because “so many of you in the archdiocese already have a place in your heart for a guy who started out as a carpenter working for his father. I was a carpenter working for my father. True.”

What is the joke here? That Trump is like Jesus Christ. Imagine if Clinton had attempted an equivalent gag. There would have been outrage and uproar: Clinton has insulted all Christians by making a blasphemous comparison between herself and the divine Savior. But the cameras cut to Dolan, a sycophantic supporter of Trump, and showed him laughing heartily. And if the cardinal found it funny, it was funny. It was thus an in-joke. If Clinton had made it, it would be the ultimate out-joke, proof of the Democrats’ contempt for people of faith.

But what is allowed as funny will sooner or later be proposed seriously. Many of those attending Trump rallies now wear T-shirts that proclaim “Jesus Is My Savior. Trump Is My President.” Some of them illustrate the slogan with a picture of an ethereal Christ laying both his hands on Trump’s shoulders. What begins as a risqué quip ends up as a religious icon. There is no line here between sacrilege and devotion, transgressive humor and religious veneration.

Just as Trump’s jokes can become literal, his ugly realities can be bathed in the soothing balm of laughter. Long before he ran for president, he was indulged on the late-night talk shows as the hilarious huckster. In 1986 Letterman tried repeatedly to get Trump to tell him how much money he had, and when he continually evaded the question, Letterman broke the tension with the laugh-line, “You act like you’re running for something.” In December 2005 Conan O’Brien asked him, “You also have an online school? Is that correct?” Trump replied, “Trump University—if you want to learn how to get rich.” The audience howled with laughter, presumably not because they thought he was kidding but because the very words “Trump University” are innately absurd. When he did that Top Ten List on Letterman in 2009, Trump’s comic financial advice included “For tip number four, simply send me $29.95.”

But these jokes came true. Trump wouldn’t say how much he was worth because his net worth was partly fictional. Trump did run for something. Trump University was an innately funny idea that people took seriously enough to enable Trump to rip them off. And Trump does want you to send him $29.95—the first thing you get on Trump’s official website is an insistent demand: “Donate Today.” This is the thing about Trump’s form of organized laughter, in which the idea of humor obscures the distinction between outlandish words and real-life actions. Sooner or later, the first becomes the second. The in-joke becomes the killer line.

The pond now has a bet going that Killer started at Trump University but never managed to collect his degree ...

Meanwhile on another planet, far removed from Killer's comedy stylings ...