I’ve often wondered whether the best way to respond to casual sexual harassment of the verbal variety—the vulgar catcall in the street, the comment hissed in your ear by the guy passing you on the subway stairs—is with a joke. Not a funny-ha-ha joke; a cutting joke, the kind that immediately flips the power dynamic so that the guy is left speechless and fuming as you sail down the sidewalk to get on with your day. So much harassment is predicated on the assumption of no response, getting off the shot before the target can fire back. Why not arm yourself with a simple one-liner before leaving the house, a little spritz of pepper spray stowed in the mental purse? “That all you got?” I’d like to say to the creep, with a bemused, pitying smile. “I’ve heard that one before—gotta keep working on your material if you want to compete in this town.”
Instead, I’m caught in speechless surprise, stuck re-litigating the encounter in my head. What would I say now to the man who crouched over me as I lay dozing in a park, and told me, when I asked him to remove himself, that with my bad attitude I’d never have babies? (I locked eyes with him and spit on the ground: forceful, but not very witty.) What about the dude who shouted some lewdness at me as I waited for the bus on Fifth Avenue, nineteen years old, head in the clouds? A decade later, I no longer remember his provocation, but I do remember the response I decided on, five minutes after the fact: “That’s not what your mother said last night.” Not original, sure, but sometimes funny-ha-ha works just fine.
As many people have noted, the Women’s March this weekend, in addition to being forceful, moving, and, yes, huge, was funny. Actually, it was hilarious, a vindication of the humor of women performed on a stage that stretched the whole world wide. Walking down Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., members of my little squadron kept gleefully pointing out signs and costumes to one another. “Girls Just Wanna Have FUN-damental Rights” was a popular one, as was “Grab Him by the First Amendment.” There were many entries in the tiny-hands category, as in “Keep Your Tiny Hands Off Our First Amendment.” Some people were justifiably dark: “Sex Offenders Cannot Live in Government Housing.” There were enough uterus-themed signs to make up their own genre. Every pussy hat was a punch line.
A Donald Trump puppet came into view, bobbing above the crowd: orange face; yellow hair; gaping, blabbing mouth; and that extra-long red tie, a penis joke in its own right. The sign below him read “Not a puppet / You’re a puppet,” in English and Russian. That pathetic line, from the third debate, served as a reminder of just how thin Trump’s skin is, just how bad he is at coming up with a comeback. At the second debate, days after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape heard ’round the world, he had loomed behind Hillary Clinton on the stage like a garden-variety subway predator. It was agonizing to watch. I kept my eyes on Twitter, where the jokes were flying fast and free. That humor was fierce, bitter, biting, but desperate, a coping mechanism. The humor of the Women’s March was different in tone—sometimes goofy, sometimes pointed, rooted in satire rather than snark. In his Sunday newsletter, the journalist Mike Allen asked if anyone had noticed “the crude, discriminating language and signs used by some to lambaste a president they condemn as crude and discriminating.” He seemed to have just discovered the concept of parody.
The Women’s March humor worked, too, because of the variance of tone on display. For every funny sign, there were five sincere ones. That, I think, is how humor should operate under the conditions in which we find ourselves, when more headlines than not seem to have come from the Onion or the eerily ingenious ClickHole: not as the default mode, a smug substitute for sincerity, but as its accent note, a way of speaking the kind of truth you can’t with a straight face.
As Emily Nussbaum wrote in the magazine last week, Trump, along with a sizable contingent of his supporters, has made use of a certain nihilistic humor as a cover for his lies. Before this election, it wouldn’t have seemed possible that tagging a “just kidding” onto the end of any number of cruel, bigoted, dangerous statements could serve to excuse them, but that is what Trump has done, time and again, while making it clear that he is anything but. (Of course, when he is explicitly called on to be funny, as at the Al Smith dinner, he chokes. There he sat, glowering in tyrannical fury, as Clinton sliced and diced him better than any late-night comedian had yet managed to do.) Nussbaum noted that Trump, lately, has stopped making jokes, or the bilious little phrases that he seems to think are the equivalent of jokes. Power isn’t funny; it’s true humor’s best target. In some small way, the dynamic has flipped, and Trump is now on the receiving end. What, he can dish it out but he can’t take it? We already know the answer to that one. Humor isn’t everything, far from it. But we have a long slog ahead, and we’re going to need every tool we’ve got.