Imagine Donald Trump watching that scene in Bridesmaids where the group gets food poisoning in the bridal shop and Melissa McCarthy’s character unburdens herself in the bathroom sink. Now why is it so much easier to imagine Trump having diarrhea than it is to picture him enjoying one of the funniest movie moments in 15 years? Maybe diarrhea is an easier leap because he’s got the verbal kind locked.
“Have you ever seen the guy laugh?” Tim Walz asked CNN’s Jake Tapper in July, shortly before Kamala Harris picked Walz as her running mate. It was a brilliant—maybe even election-altering—observation, because it goes straight to the heart of what makes Trump, to quote another of Walz’s sublime contributions to the election dialectic, so weird. The man barely laughs! He makes jokes, sure. He also retroactively insists that asinine things he previously said were jokes. (That whole “Inject bleach to prevent Covid” thing? Just joshin’!) On the campaign trail, Trump gives off big stand-up comedian energy, dispensing little jabs at his opponents and making light of his felony charges. Maybe one of the reasons we rarely see him crack up is because, as any comedian or Saturday Night Live cast member knows, “breaking” can ruin the joke. Or maybe it’s because Trump takes no pleasure in other people’s humor. He is, after all, the only president in history too aggrieved to attend any of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinners. There’s a reason you can picture Trump watching porn, but not delighting in a comedy. Laughing requires acknowledging another person’s right to exist, which he generally reserves for clusters of cells in women’s bodies.
Now Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has a near-legendary laugh, a laugh someone on her team probably told her to “get ahead of,” because back in April she went on The Drew Barrymore Show and explained that she laughs “from the belly,” like her mother. Republicans have gone after uninhibited shows of happiness like this in the past. See: Hillary Clinton and her “cackle.” (In 2016, Trump voters could buy T-shirts of a grinning Clinton photoshopped on a broom.) Meanwhile, when I search “Trump laugh” on YouTube, the first result is a clip titled “Trump laughs after audience member suggests shooting migrants.” (Oof.) The audience member yells, “Shoot them!” Trump’s face registers amusement, he takes a breath, and the left side of his mouth—can he do it?—twists up ever so slightly. True to form, Trump recently pulled a reverse Tim Walz—that sounds like something from the Olympics, I know—and slammed Kamala in front of a Michigan crowd: “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh.”
That may be the one thing I agree with Trump on. And it seems the American electorate does, too. Just six months ago, the predominant emotion facing a Biden/Trump race, at least among Democrats, was a teeth-gnashing dread. Now that we can finally exhale thanks to fresh faces on the ticket, mirth, it seems, might be a deciding factor in the election.
I think about laughter a lot, because I’m a TV comedy writer. OK, a lot is a stretch. It’s not as if comedy writers sit around calculating what will get the biggest reaction from the most people. But you pitch a funny thing, someone else pitches a funny thing, everyone cracks up, rinse, repeat, until you get something so hilarious people are in tears. That something goes in the script. Or at least that’s how the great writers’ rooms work. They’re generous, even democratic. The laughter between a group of funny people is a release, sure. But it’s also bonding, inclusive.
On one show, we played a version of Would You Rather that we called Who’d You Rather, which was, oddly, not about sex. Name two people and pick who you’d want in the writers’ room with you. For instance, you could pit William Shakespeare against that Australian “rave granny” who went viral on TikTok last year. Here’s the surprise: The more talented person doesn’t always win. When you’re doing a job with a group of people, being nice and fun to be around really matters. Shakespeare might be a great writer, but he also seems like a self-obsessed killjoy. You don’t want that guy. You want the EDM-loving old-timer who giggles. We can rewrite her scripts if we need to.
Lately, the videos of Harris’s campaign rallies have reminded me of the atmosphere in a good writers’ room on a day you’re really cooking. It’s the opposite of Trump’s stand-up comic shtick. Sure, Trump is occasionally funny, but he’s also the dickhead in the writers’ room that no one likes.
The few times we do see Trump laugh, it tends to be when the joke is at someone else’s expense. He chuckled during a White House Halloween as he put candy not in the basket of a young Minion, but on his head, and it slid off immediately. He guffawed the time someone ID’d a barking dog as Hillary. Trump’s campaign strategy is insult comedy, plain and simple. Onstage, he spews clever-adjacent jeers at his enemies as his followers, decked out like mega-fans in loads of merch, laugh gratefully. Trump doesn’t partake in the merriment, though. The people are there to enjoy him.
You could look at the polls or just trust me, but this variety of comedy seems less cathartic or appealing when juxtaposed against actual fun. And make no mistake, the Democrats are having fun. After nearly a decade of acting the part of stern professors lecturing on “the existential threat to democracy,” it’s like the party has stepped out of a screening of Sophie’s Choice into a waterslide park. Watch Harris and Walz onstage, doing call-and-response with the audience, cracking up at each other’s jokes. The pressure valve has been released, and relief is in the air. All four days of the Democratic National Convention felt like when the plane lands after a turbulent flight, and the entire cabin breaks into applause. It’s that Oh shit that could have been bad kind of euphoria.
Walz, you’ll have noticed, has a hearty laugh, too. He stands behind Kamala, hand on his heart, sometimes doubling over he’s so tickled. I should probably do a YouTube search for “J.D. Vance laugh,” but it’s not for me. I get scared during Harry Potter movies. Suffice it to say I haven’t witnessed it yet, even when a Fox reporter asked Vance, “What makes you smile?” Vance’s reply? “I smile at a lot of things.” Then he called it a bogus question, and went on to list the things he was pissed about.
The Harris/Walz ebullience has Donald Trump short-circuiting. Maybe you caught his mid-August meltdowns disguised as “press conferences”? Happiness is all the rage, and he doesn’t know what to do with something he can’t ridicule or sexually assault. He simply can’t (Marie Kondo voice) spark joy. His alpha-dog personality wouldn’t let him admit it, but laughter isn’t easily feigned. Researchers have found that people are incredibly skilled at differentiating the real thing from the canned variety. Genuine laughs have a faster cadence, explained Gregory Bryant, the co-author of a study about spontaneous human laughter. Fake laughs, by contrast, are slower. And our brains can tell the difference.
The other day, I walked in on my 78-year-old dad, a Minnesotan, on the sofa with the dog in his lap, watching a cable news panel about the Harris/Walz rally in Philadelphia. Over the last decade, my father has mostly voted Democratic, but that wasn’t always the case. (We don’t talk about the 2004 election in our family.) Anyway, Dad was watching TV and giggling. Giggling! At the news in the year of our Lord 2024. The panel guests were smiling. The program was displaying funny tweets, including one that showed Kamala and Tim right after Walz made a J.D. Vance couch joke. It looked like a freeze-frame from an ’80s sitcom. If Trump saw it, it must have sent a chill up his spine. November’s coming. Who’s not laughing now?
