One can tell a lot about a person, or a culture, by observing how that person or culture relates to humor. Do they have a sense of humor? Do they like to cut up? Can they roll with banter and friendly mockery, taking it and dishing it out? Or, do they scowl and take offense at words that everyone else finds amusing?
Who knows if there’s any research behind the idea, but it seems pretty clear to a lot of people that authoritarian and totalitarian ways of thinking don’t make room for humor. Authoritarian personalities hate being mocked, and totalitarian regimes take deep—and often violent—offense at humor’s close cousin, satire, as author Salman Rushdie has learned painfully and repeatedly.
Since the election of Donald Trump this time around, it’s been quite clear that the left has zero sense of humor. Or more nearly, they have no sense of humor about themselves even as they allow their side to indulge in “humor” that’s not-even-thinly disguised wishes of violence on anyone to the right of center. One suspects that part of what makes the left so angry is the fact that, like him or not, Donald Trump is naturally charismatic and funny, and he does it on his toes.
MSNBC’s wig mistress in chief Joy Reid is having none of it, thank you very much. You can tell just by the look on her face.
What turned Reid’s smile upside down recently was a quip from Trump to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The light-loafered “former” drama teacher made a trip to Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago recently in an apparent attempt to dissuade the president-elect from enacting a 25 percent tariff on imported Canadian goods. According to Joy Reid, Trump “threatened” Trudeau and Canada.
With what? An off-the-cuff (and funny) retort that if Canada didn’t like the tariff, maybe they should just become the 51st U.S. state. While the exchange was not recorded, and the joke was relayed to Fox second-hand by unnamed sources, Trump probably did jokingly “threaten” to annex Canada – and we can all picture him doing just that.
Yet, Joyless Reid can’t see the humor in it.
Come on. Is Joy Reid truly that literal-minded, or is it all a pretense? It’s hard to say, but easy to see that the vast majority of sane adults would recognize Trump’s remark as verbal play (key word: sane). The idea of the United States forcibly invading Canada is even more laughable than the liberal media’s apparent belief that Trump meant to threaten a ground war on our northern cousins.
Fortunately X/Twitter users have a healthier funny bone than our MSNBC hostess.
