Laughing Out Loud by Roger Vaughan

I don’t know about you, but I’ve read a ton of thoughtful analysis about the American Horror Show going on in Washington. No matter what side you’re on, both the quantity and the quality of the news could not be more exhausting, or confusing.                     

Even if you voted for Trump, even if you think Putin had a right to invade Ukraine, the boorish way President Zelensky of Ukraine was bullied in the Oval Office was shocking. As was the attack on Canada. As was the destruction of the Black Lives Matter plaza in Washington. It’s a long, disturbing list. David Brooks, a Republican, wrote in the NYTimes recently, “The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower. . .This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot.”

Maybe you agree with the US joining Russia, Israel, North Korea, Sudan, Belarus, Hungary and 11 other similarly oppressive regimes voting in the United Nations against supporting Ukraine (96 nations voted for supporting Ukraine). Many saw the US vote as a shift away from our country’s support of freedom, away from America’s commitment to Democracy. In any case, the potential collateral damage of such a 180-degree turnaround by the United States has to have created some general anxiety for all of us. And the possibility of how life might be altered for the worse without the vaccinations we’ve enjoyed against various communicable diseases must create a common concern, at least.

We are deep into a colossal, fundamental change. As David French, a Republican who became an Independent in 2018, wrote in the NYTimes (2-25):

“American elections could reset our national security strategy, but they did not change our bedrock alliances. They did not change our fundamental identity. Both parties were committed to NATO. Both parties saw the Soviet Union as the grave national security threat it was…Our voters may indeed choose a leader who will abandon our traditional alliances and actively support one of the world’s most dangerous and oppressive regimes.”

In a short eight weeks of the Trump Presidency, that has come to pass. David French thinks the slew of on-again, off-again policies being dictated puts us in peril. Disagree or not, we’re faced with living in a new “American normal” in which our administration’s attitude toward the rest of the world has become radically isolationist, with a hard-right, authoritarian turn. The flurry of executive orders being dispatched are demonstrably in line with how other dictatorships operate. And the administration’s attitude toward many of its own citizens — mainly non-whites along with LGBTQIA+ — the plus in this case standing for disabled, has become blatantly oppressive; dismissive. Even the future of free speech is on the table.

What I don’t read is any good advice about how we should all deal with this upsetting, cataclysmic turnabout without losing our minds. It’s all-consuming, as if we had awakened one morning to find all the trees had been felled while we slept. We can’t ignore it, or pretend it isn’t happening. This is no time to decide to stop reading the news and redefine oneself as apolitical. As New Yorker editor David Remick wrote in the 3/10/25 issue, “To minimize the unending fusillade of Trump’s first weeks in office, to choose to turn away, to shut off the news, is to indulge in self-soothing.” Supporting a Democracy means keeping up, participating even in some simple way. 

But it is a good idea to limit one’s intake of the news, just as one limits the number of drinks one has at the bar, or miles run on that treadmill after work. Moderation has always been a key to survival. What we’re after is a crutch, something to help us maintain a balance so we don’t fall on our faces. For me it’s humor. 

It happens laughter is good for us. There are many books celebrating humor’s therapeutic value. Notable among them is Anatomy of an Illness, journalist Norman Cousins’ story of how a daily dose of laughter helped him overcome a rare, debilitating disease. Humor is a large arena. And luckily, laughter is an innate human response. Everyone has a funny bone that gets tickled in a variety of ways, from ruefully to sillily to outrageously to black. 

Many comedians have kept me laughing over the past years: Lenny Bruce, Johnny Carson, Bob Newhart, Bill Murray, Tim Minchin, Robin Williams, Judy Tenuta, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Jerry Seinfeld, and Eddie Murphy to name a few. And Richard Pryor, maybe the most talented of them all. 

Save racing in the Tour de France, or being a classical music soloist, there can’t be anything more difficult to pull off than standup comedy. Good or bad, we needy patrons have to admire any persons brave enough to expose their very souls to a public microphone. Just oneself on stage trying to make people laugh armed with nothing more than a few routines and a clever presentation has to be one of the loneliest gigs there is. 

The current group of standups, while small, is larger than it used to be. It can start with Chris Rock, a well-established star who has been around for a while. You might recall him getting famously slapped by Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars after Rock made Smith’s wife the subject of a joke. Smith must not have understood that everything – everyone – is grist for the standup’s mill. Truly equal opportunity. Rock is the one who told us he’d had more contact with his parents in the 16 years of the cell phone than in the previous 40 years. Standups often insert insights like that into their act, items that aren’t particularly funny, but that reveal unique perspectives. 

As a group, standup comedians are smart, clever. The culture, the news, every day events, everything from the sublime (“Guns should be banned. We should ban certain people from buying them.” Pause. “Like men.” – Emily Catalano) to the ridiculous (“I’m dating the Pope. I’m just using him to get to God.” – Judy Tenuta) is their raw material. They know it all cold, and take it apart it from every possible angle. For them it’s the news, all the news, all the rumors and then some run through their humor filters.

Dave Chappelle is another well-established star. His comedy sketch show in the early 2000s was very racial and also hilarious.  Features about the “Niggas” family, and Clayton Bigsby, the world’s only Black White Supremacist, were two of the Chappelle Show’s regulars. His powerful, hour-long standup shows since then have been unique for their off-hand, conversational presentation and their “serious,” often controversial humor. His punch lines are aptly named. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Chappelle enjoys probing the raw roots of issues. In one routine when he imagines buying a gun, he says the clerk put two boxes of shells on the counter. One had a picture of a duck on it. The other had a picture of a deer on it. Which do you want, the clerk asked him. “I want the one with a picture of a white dude trespassing on it,” Chappelle said. 

In a much-admired monologue on SNL before Trump was sworn in, Chappelle got serious. He said he knew Trump would be watching as he followed a true story he related about President Jimmy Carter walking bravely through dangerous Palestinian streets, with this: “The Presidency is no place for petty people. Whether or not they voted for you, people are counting on you. Do better next time. Have empathy for displaced people.”

Trump evidently wasn’t watching.

The British standup, Ricky Gervais, is another gritty performer. Like Chappelle, Gervais is able to integrate spontaneously and unpredictably with his audience while often taking it slightly beyond most of their limits. Once he spoke of a friend’s aunt dying of Alzheimer’s. “How do you die of Alzheimer’s? She forgot to live.” Gervais reassures us about our blackest amusing thoughts: “You can’t choose your sense of humor. It’s involuntary. But that’s what humor is for, to laugh at the bad shit.” 

He goes on to say a fellow comedian once tried to criticize him by saying he was funny as a fart at a baby’s funeral. Gervais found the comment hilarious. “Imagine, a big echoey church,” he said, “everyone sobbing, and someone farts. You’d laugh, even if it were your baby.” 

Late night hosts have to be included because thanks to Johnny Carson’s formula, they open their shows with a standup monolog. While whomever is President is fair game for all of them, no one has gone after Trump with the sustained tenacity of Jimmy Kimmel. Call it a feud. Kimmel recently said he had set his clock ahead four years, but it hadn’t worked. And over a video clip of Elon Musk shown returning from a weekend at Mar-a-Largo, Kimmel said Trump’s current enforcer was “dressed like the first person to be eliminated from the World Series of Poker. Trump called Kimmel “The worst host in the history of the Academy Awards.” Kimmel read the quote on air. 

The number of those trying standup comedy has increased, perhaps because with climate chaos, over population, and the proliferation of political absurdity, there has never been so much raw material available for humorous treatment. Social media has made it easier to get noticed. 

The new crop of standups includes many women, a welcome addition to the art. The women tend to stick with subjects like men, dating, relationships, marriage, femininity, and fashion rather than politics. After the late accordion-wielding pioneer, Judy Tenuta (“I like to hunt. . .I like to wear safety orange”), Amy Schumer was one of the first women on the standup scene, and one of the nastiest. Shock is her game. Sex at its raunchiest is often her subject of choice. She’s in your face, challenging, aggressive. At one of her tamer moments, Schumer said, “First it was big boobs, then it was big butts. What’s next, scoliosis?” 

An engaging female standup in the crowd is Emily Catalano, a quiet-spoken, poker-faced woman in her 30s. She looks slightly uncomfortable on stage, like an elementary school teacher on a field trip, wearing versions of a basic brown stocking cap pulled over straggly braids, and a hoody. Her calm, wide-set eyes cooly sweep her audience behind round, horn-rimmed glasses. Her soft delivery is almost a monotone. She presents a sympathetic character.

“The hardest part about being a Christian,” Emily says, “is being better than everybody else.” Or: “The only time there was sex talk in my house growing up was when our pastor had an affair.” Or: “A fellow comedian asked me why I don’t have jokes about my lazy eye.” Long pause. “That’s how I found out I had a lazy eye.” Or: “I got divorced in California. It takes six months there before it’s final. I wonder why. Maybe it’s in case your ex gets a job.” Or: “I was an atheist. I changed to agnostic so people would like me.” Or: “My boyfriend wants me to be his mom. That’s not me. I’m his dad. Because I’m gonna leave him.” Or: “We lost. I hate losing. To that guy. We lost to a guy with brain damage.”

Then there’s Jim Jeffries, a UK native who has made a big success for himself in America with sell out shows in several major cities. Jeffries can’t resist joking about our politics. Like all standups, he loves Donald Trump for the constant flow of material Trump provides. “He’s fun, you know.” Jeffries says. “He’s like a high school kid running for class president walking around saying `We’re gonna have two lunches, and a soda machine in every classroom!’ That’s all good fun. But then there’s not fun. He prays on fear, the Mexicans coming over and raping.”

Jeffries fixes on Trump’s intention to list all Muslims living in the USA on a register: “Imagine you’re a 16-year-old Muslim kid who’s lived here all his life, who thinks he is an American, and now he’s being told he’s not welcome, he’s being put on a register. How quickly could that kid be radicalized now?

“[Trump’s] trying to defeat hate with hate and only making more hate,” Jeffries said in his Freedumb Netflix special eight years ago. “Only love can beat hate.” It doesn’t always work, Jeffries admits, but he suggests finding a person who you hate and who hates you and showing them nothing but love. “That person will still probably hate you, but one thing will happen: eventually everyone will see them as the asshole.”

Humor. You wouldn’t hear that on the evening news.

Roger Vaughan, a Massachusetts native, began writing, photographing, playing music, and sailing at a young age, pursuits that shaped his lifelong career. After earning a BA in English from Brown University, he worked as an editor and writer for Saturday Evening Post and Life magazines, covering major cultural events of the 1960s and 70s. His first book, The Grand Gesture (1973), launched a prolific freelance writing career. He’s written more than 20 books, including numerous biographies, films, and many videos. Since 1980, Vaughan has lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he continues his work documenting remarkable individuals and events.