There is nothing quite like a joke that falls flat.
I say this from experience. While in Washington, D.C. this past summer, I set a personal goal of learning stand-up comedy by performing in at least one open mic a week. I’d show up to an inexplicably sticky bar in some yuppified corner of the city and do a five-minute set in which I repeated mildly revised versions of jokes about horse racing, ambulances, and The Avengers. I also talked about HGTV’s House Hunters a lot.
I learned that comedy is about building trust as much as anything else. Comedians construct unique characters and perspectives with the goal of making the audience accept them. This task involves some manipulation: you misdirect, exaggerate, and sometimes lie in order to get them to see the absurdity of the world that you’re painting. When things go well, everyone buys into it. With a bad joke, the whole charade falls apart: it becomes obvious that you’re just a normal person using as many tricks as you can to get laughs.
Both comedians and politicians rely on projecting identities to the public. For comedians, these identities can be irreverent, callous, or even hyperbolic—the Stephen Colbert you see on stage is different than the Colbert you bump into at Starbucks. For politicians, the personas are patriotic, intelligent, altruistic, and genuine. They take pictures in front of American flags and give inspiring speeches in front of bleachers filled with diverse constituents.
You can sense a code of conduct, language, and doublespeak that channels political action and thought. GOP presidential candidates’ economic packages proposed at the November 10 Fox Business/Wall St. Journal debate almost uniformly invoked a repeal of Obamacare (despite receiving almost no questions regarding the issue). Around elections, parties seem to cluster around certain key terms, as a New York Times infographic of the 2012 campaigns’ national conventions shows. The Global Language Monitor, an analytics firm that tracks language usage, determined the top 53 political buzzwords for the 2012 election. Among them: “toxic politics,” “out-of-control spending,” and “obstructionist Congress.”
In other words, politics, like comedy, relies on the creation of a certain type of reality. The characters that are built, and their interactions with the audience or electorate, are channeled by their use of language meant to elicit emotional responses. The words comedians and politicians use need to pack a punch, especially since the average political sound bite now hovers around nine seconds.
Both systems rely on the audience’s trust. But when people become skeptical of the nine-second sound bite, the rapport and trust between the person on the national stage and the audience on the voter rolls breaks down. This is the bad joke moment.
There seems to be widespread cynicism about American politics today. Think about just a few of the presidential candidates who have been criticized on questions of trust or credibility: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Hillary Clinton. In each case, the curtain seems to have drawn back to reveal misrepresentation by people asking to be voters’ representatives.
This is not to say that all politicians are liars, or that the political system is broken. Rather, I want to point out the importance of trust and note that political discourse has evolved in such a way that undermines public officials’ ability to maintain that trust. There is something inherent in short sound bites, buzzwords, and a rapid news cycle that encourages politicians to say things that do not capture the entire truth, and thus these practices should make us wary.
To see what happens when trust erodes, consider an international example: Brazil. The South American country is in the midst of a corruption scandal implicating leading politicians, officials, the state-owned oil company, and private construction firms. Now, presidential approval is at historically low levels, there have been a series of massive protests against the government calling for impeachments or resignations, and the executive and Congress are caught in deadlock.
It is hard to bounce back from a bad joke, but it can be done. For the comedian, it involves gradually building trust up again with the audience: for example, you switch to a new joke, or you acknowledge your previous mistake. For politicians, the task is probably the same.
Image source: Matthias Rosenkranz/Flickr