Comedians only care about comedy.

Somebody who writes jokes for a living I've always had a professional interest in what makes things funny. So I will probably buy ‘Comedy Book’, by Jesse David Fox, who is, apparently, a comedy critic at New York magazine.

Hell of a job, really.

I just saw it written up at The Atlantic, with this lede that pushed all my buttons.

We are in a moment, comedy-wise. On the one hand, there’s never been more of it—more specials, podcasts, comedy-generated discussions and debate and cultural flare-ups. There’s a rhythm and an expertise about comedy criticism right now (Fox’s very much included) that reminds me of good jazz writing from the ’50s and ’60s: savvy, insidery, immersed, excited, with its own developing vocabulary.

On the other hand, comedy, like everything else, is in bits. Online, it has shattered into memes and trolls and culture warlords and goats singing Bon Jovi. Laughter itself has fragmented. Just listen to it: You’ve got your gurgling, impotent The Late Show With Stephen Colbert laughter over here; you’ve got your harsh and barkingly energized Trumpist laughter over there; you’ve got your free-floating Joe Rogan–podcast yuks; and then you’ve got the private snuffling and seizurelike sounds that you yourself make when you’re watching Jay Jurden Instagram clips alone, on your phone, with your earbuds in. And for most of us, behind all of this, the feeling that we’re whistling past the graveyard: that the sludge is rising, politically; that the bullyboys are cracking their knuckles; that we’re “just kind of half-waiting,” as Marc Maron put it in a recent HBO special, “for the stupids to choose a uniform.”

What really caught my interest though was this bit about Donald Trump as a wouldbe stand-up - a theory I’ve long held.

Donald Trump, the stand-up at the gates of hell, is obviously a massive problem for comedy. Clinically humorless, destitute of jokes, too strange to be hacky, and with the comic precision of a broken bicycle chain, he still—as the comedians say—destroys. He kills, night after night. He gives people, by God, that comedy feeling, or his version of it: gaseous, loopy, sneering, idolatrous, incipiently violent. Fascist levity. He’s almost a prop comic, but his prop is human weakness. Is he, in his dark-side-of-the-moon way, teaching us something about comedy? What if the breakthrough comedy event of the past five years was not Nanette or Rothaniel but the Trump rally where he said, “I can be more presidential than any candidate that ever ran, than any president, other than maybe Abraham Lincoln when he is wearing his hat”?

I haven’t even seen him do his Abe Lincoln hat bit, but honestly, it does kill.