Comedy and Cruelty
The Comic Mode in the Age of Trump
Mitchell Wilson
I first thought about the place, or lack of place, of comedy in psychoanalysis while reading Miranda July’s novel All Fours (2024). July’s book is an argument for the validity of the comic mode in fiction (not a hard sell) and the comic mode in living (a harder sell, perhaps). Sexuality and erotic engagement are key elements in how the comic narrative gets going and how it expends the energy of its investments. If brought into conversation with psychoanalysis, this argument and its narratives take up most of the room, leaving psychoanalysis without much to say. This is because psychoanalysis turned its back long ago on any hint of the comic. Likewise, the erotic and sexuality more generally are but distant memories. A central task in this essay is to resurrect the comic mode and to bring it into meaningful relation with the tragic narrative that so dominates psychoanalytic theory and writing from the clinic.
As a comedian in the usual sense of the term, Donald Trump belongs in this discussion because he, too, traffic in the comic. He’s an engine of jouissance—of incitement and excitement—for a collective movement with its own lexicon, rules, and norms. Like July, Trump breaks up old social structures and, in so doing, creates new ones. This movement from old to new—from relative constraint to relative freedom—is a central feature of the comic genre and of the arc of the comic narrative form.[1] In this sense, comedy functions as resistance in relation to extant social structures and ways of being. Comic forms are catalytic and often channel a productive hostility, breaking things up and occasioning new social arrangements, either on a personal or more broadly political level.
For the most part, psychoanalysis pathologizes the worlds that July and Trump create. These worlds tend to be viewed with skepticism, concern, worry, and opprobrium. In these comic narratives, the main actors are occasions for diagnosis: July’s characters use manic defenses to ward off grief, let’s say, or Trump is a malignant narcissist, obviously. These assumptions of the diagnostician amount to an implied mastery and superiority over them. Such assumptions are offered as givens with general validity. Everyone, if they are rational, would and should believe them. Perhaps some would champion one and condemn the other? Yes, July, and No, Trump! Common as it might be, such a polarizing and splitting response would miss the broader issue at hand. First, there’s a nagging suspicion we might be wrong, that we are somehow blinded to the truth. It’s the comedian (or the Fool, after all), who is sane enough to see into the painful heart of things. Then there’s the aforementioned problem of mastery. To hastily decide which comedy is worthy and which is dangerous is not as straightforward as might be presumed.
The relation between July and Trump shows that the comic mode, as a way of being and an argument for a specific kind of organized living, does not specify its politics; it can be employed in various ways, from radically rearranging family life (July) to radically dismantling existing institutions and the norms of political life (Trump). The styles of comedy that July and Trump perform show that cruelty, brazen in its nakedness, serves as one fulcrum and dividing line between them. This is especially true regarding their differing approaches to the domain of intimate living—how and whom we love and how this living is organized (e.g., family structures and the like). Respect, if not kindness exactly, is an important feature of the world July creates in All Fours. In stark contrast, a specific kind of sadism—a mocking cruelty—threads its way through the Trumpian world. Living in it, I was not left laughing. I found myself in a state of abjection.
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Ever since Freud made Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex the cornerstone of his theory of neurosis, psychoanalysis has been linked to the tragic. The structure of tragedy means that its outcome is preordained; the writing is already on the wall. Character, marked by moral blindness or folly, unfolds inexorably and is embedded in a narrative arc whose ending is never in doubt. How often have we said to ourselves or whispered to the person sitting next to us as Iago worms his way into Othello’s mind, “No! Don’t fall for it! Can’t you see that the handkerchief was planted?” Apparently not. In this sense, tragedy is entirely conservative. The energies of desire have been corralled and channeled in the service of a preordained end, which is the ultimate end: death.
While devoted to the tragic mode from its beginnings, a specific emphasis now marks its form within psychoanalysis: the tragic has become the traumatic. The dominance of the trauma narrative—that bad things happen to good people—is so thoroughgoing that we’ve struggled to notice it. Only recently has the “trauma plot,” in literature and memoir, been seen and conceptualized as a literary device. Such plots mark the clinical literature, replete with more or less the same story, usually told with little irony or nuance: the analytic patient, as a young, innocent child, suffered trauma at the hands of terrible, wounded, or neglectful adults—usually, let’s be clear, bad mothers. Now, that patient is making things difficult for the analyst, captured in Bion’s well-known quip that the analyst’s task is “making the best of a bad job.” These papers are almost always written in the tragic idiom, in tones grave and lugubrious, their moralizing position obvious. One way or another, the analyst finds a path through all the difficult and despairing moments. Over time, the patient becomes more cooperative, feels guilt for being so vengeful and bitter, makes attempts to repair the damage they have done, and so on. The trauma narrative that supposedly explains the patient’s problems also explains the burdens under which the analyst labors.
“Respect, if not kindness exactly, is an important feature of the world July creates in All Fours. In stark contrast, a specific kind of sadism—a mocking cruelty—threads its way through the Trumpian world. Living in it, I was not left laughing.”
These writings do a specific kind of rhetorical work that serves its imagined psychoanalytic audience: They signal how challenging it is to be a psychoanalyst and how this challenge relates to the patient’s violent repetition, cynicism, grievance, and unmourned losses. I don’t mean to imply that humans don’t behave in these ways or struggle with these conflicts, nor am I suggesting that psychoanalysis isn’t, in fact, an impossible profession. Rather, the broad outlines of this plot, and especially the tragic mode in which it is most often told, have become a prominent and accepted understanding of the kinds of challenges a psychoanalyst faces. With the earned moral authority of the trauma victim, our best option is to mourn the unspeakable and write about it in funereal tones, an elegiac lament about how hard the analyst’s job really is.
Thankfully, not all is lost. Psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou critiques the profession for its “traumatophobia,” a “particular epistemology of trauma [that] now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.” This epistemology sees trauma as contingent, rather than foundational, to what it means to be human. It suggests it can be healed, as Saketopoulou states, like “a piece of shrapnel to be removed.” She contrasts the traumatophobic position with what she calls the “traumatophilic”—a willingness to engage with trauma and lean into it, surely a way of living that is not without emotional risk. The key point is that a creative embrace of one’s traumatic past, however it is encoded in the present, is not viewed as a pathological repetition but rather “as a cause of becoming.” Her work loosens the grip that the tragic view, of which the trauma narrative is a central feature, has had on psychoanalytic thinking and how it informs typical modes of writing.
Perhaps it is time for psychoanalysis to once again borrow from literature. In her New Yorker essay “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” Parul Sehgal writes, “Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?).” “The invocation of trauma,” she writes, “promises access to some well-guarded bloody chamber; increasingly, though, we feel as if we have entered a rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover.” Here, Sehgal skewers a distinct and gathering trend in fiction and memoir that finds its legitimacy in pain and suffering because of a troubled past, which produces work that tends to go over the same human material, if not the same specific lived ground. She compares this trend to the marriage plot, futural in its orientation, erotic in its essence, and uncertain as to its outcome. The marriage plot is more interesting, less concretized, and less predetermined. (We’ll encounter a motel room that is anything but generic—and what a motel room it turns out to be!—when we get to Miranda July’s marriage plot in All Fours.)
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It is easy to forget that Freud, especially in his early theorizing, was focused not only on trauma and the reality of sexual abuse but also on wordplay, humor, and the machinery of how a joke works. In fact, the near identity of the construction of a joke and that of a dream was immediately evident to his early collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, who wrote to Freud after reading the proofs of The Interpretation of Dreams that the dreams were too full of jokes. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud notes that “joke-work and dream-work must be identical.” Within that dreamwork/jokework, often enough and especially in Freud, one experiences a hit, an undeniably pleasurable taste of the erotic in the sudden juxtaposition of the expected and the unexpected. In his “Dream of the Botanical Monograph,” Freud’s unpacking of the floral signifier leads him to his erotic life: the “blooming” good looks of his friend’s wife, for whom he has a secret admiration. Even Freud’s famous maxim—that the therapeutic aim of psychoanalysis is to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness—has a wry ring to it, in that common unhappiness is a pretty damn good state in which to find oneself, one that an intensive psychotherapeutic treatment may reasonably aim at. Desire is alive in unhappiness, caught between the “un” and the happiness that is desire’s ever-receding object.
Notice that even the turn from misery to unhappiness is, in fact, a turn, a movement from a less desirable state to another, better state. Things can change. Things can change for the better. A futural orientation—where the prescripted (seen in tragedy) is replaced by the unscripted—is essential to this movement toward life, toward possibility. This claim of the possibility of movement and change is the essence of comic sensibility, and comic narratives are exactly about changes in social structure and social status, moving from old, ossified worlds to new and more open ones without significant costs like injury or death. The Latin grammarian Evanthius writes in On Drama, “In comedy the fortunes of men are ordinary, the onslaughts of difficulties minor, the outcomes of actions happy.” “If the comic hero trips up and falls in the soup,” Lacan notes in his Ethics seminar, “the little fellow nevertheless survives.”
Though Lacan spends a lot of time on the nature of tragedy in Ethics, comedy enters the discussion later in the seminar; in other seminars, he lays stress on the phallus as its central signifier. Far from being the master signifier in a reified and fixed sense, the phallic signifier is more like a joke (in the same spirit that Lacan once referred to himself as a “clown”): It rises and falls, appears and disappears, works and then comically doesn’t. Veils suggest its presence, and prosthetics prop it up. It’s junk.
While the Lacanian tradition has always allowed for the sexual and jouissance, which Laplanche deepens and expands in his theory of seduction and infantile sexuality, most contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives notably lack a focus on sexuality and the erotic. Melanie Klein emphasizes aggression and the death instinct in her view of “primitive” defensive organizations, and it is true that the morality tale of good and bad objects is intertwined with the body’s visceral realities, excitement, and jouissance. However, it is challenging to find in Klein more playful elements, let alone anything flirty, funny, or erotic. In the aftermath of Klein, both Bion and Winnicott, as if from benign neglect, allowed the sexual and the erotic to disappear from the picture. True, Winnicott puts play in the center of both a meaningful life and a meaningful psychoanalytic treatment. But for Winnicott play is associated with normative views of child development, rather than with transgressive aspects of sexuality or the erotic per se, especially the ways in which these disturb and at times upend the “normal.”[2] This neglect aligns perfectly with the rise of the trauma narrative in psychoanalytic discourse. Trauma and loss are decidedly not erotic; comedy is. Comedy loses its juice when disengaged from the real of bodily desire, the thrill of transgression, and the erotic movement toward sexual congress.
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Let’s agree to the following well-accepted features of the comedic form:
1) It is an argument for the new—a new relationship, a new social order, new and freer standards for speech and for love.[3] In this sense, comedy is a means of liberation, and is in its essence political. A comic plot is not mythos, as in tragedy, but logos.
2) No one gets hurt: “The little fellow nevertheless survives.” “The outcomes of actions [are] happy.”
3) Erotics, desire, and jouissance are the motive forces for comic action. Sexual themes and gender-bending playfulness go back to the earliest known comedies in ancient Greece, 200 years before Aristotle wrote his Poetics. Comedy emerged from Dionysiac festivals which utilized the theme of the phallus in songs (usually in the service of parody and mockery) and as ridiculous phallic props (misshapen, huge, embarrassingly small, etc.).
All Fours, like most comedies, is a pleasure to read, which has little to do with the usual meaning of this phrase. It’s like a romp in the hay—an extended one for sure, as different characters move in and out of the narrative, and it’s not without its embarrassing, despairing, and truly searing moments. The narrator, whom I will call N. (she is unnamed in the book), is clearly in a particular kind of distress and at times conveys an exquisite, almost friable desperation, as if her skin could be bruised or easily torn at any moment, her soul exposed in its radical aloneness and longing. N. speaks to us in a wideopen, compulsively revealing, relentlessly funny voice. Her mode of direct address calls us ever closer to her: “You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.” Me? Had I? Yes, yes, I had. Yet N. remains singular and alone as we root hard for her without easily imagining actually being her. N. wants us to watch her move about in the world as a singular body in space, taking the chances she does and risking what she has for what she might gain by shaking things up. The profound sense of wrongness has to do with her family situation. She is married, has a child, and has a successful career (“a little famous,” she says). Her music producer husband, Harris, is loving, at times distant, supportive when needed, sexy, and handsome. All of this is a problem for her, of course.
Her recurring check-ins with her close friend Jordi reinforce this captivating sense of isolation. In a breathless manner, she calls Jordi, shares the latest news with her, and, like bumpers in a pinball machine, finds and re-finds some springy guardrails. Jordi and other friends along the way watch her do what she does, just as we do, and are no less thrilled, amazed, and scared than we are. N. is a comic heroine with a picaresque quality—dishonest in a nice way, reckless and impulsive and calculating by turns, and totally cute as she tries to pull it all off. All of us are her audience.
Importantly, the framing N. does, how she sets up the story she tells, utilizes the tragic—if by tragic we mean the inexorable. It is certainly already written that N. will die. We are all talking heads atop biologically driven, genetically determined bodies whose metabolic rates are slowly but surely heading toward zero. We just don’t know when we’ll arrive there. “If this age, forty-five, turn[s] out to be the halfway point of my life,” N. tells us, “then this moment right now [is] the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.” Other parts of the story reinforce life’s fragility. Her child Sam was “dead” for a few days after they were born but miraculously recovered without any lasting consequences, except for N.’s recurrent memories of that terrifying time. N.’s paternal grandmother died by suicide because the slow ravages of aging felt too impossible for her to bear. Her father, prone to dissociation and just plain weirdness, tells her that a “new soul” recently entered his body and that he has been in a “deathfield” since N. was in the 4th grade.
The comic narrative takes shape when she decides to hit the road and head into the idyll of a bucolic wilderness—well, if not exactly a return to nature, then on a freeway out of Los Angeles on the northern route to New York City. She only gets as far as Monrovia, about 30 minutes outside of L.A. There, she settles into a motel room, meets the youthful Davey with the hot body and high EQ, and finds a way to have Davey’s interior decorator wife turn her schleppy room into a mid-century modern design marvel. The possibility of transforming staid and boring worlds into something wonderfully new happens in that room before it happens in the rest of N.’s life. All the while, her husband and child think she’s on Highway 10, heading east through Utah toward Chicago and beyond, as the lies and omissions pile up with each successive phone call home.
The phallic signifier looms large. Davey’s actual penis we never see; it’s all the more potent for being forever in reserve, never shown, never touched. N., in fact, is more phallic than any other character in the book—in fantasy, in the use of devices, dildos, and strap-ons, and in intimate, sexy situations with Davey and other folks after N. comes home from Monrovia. The libidinal energy is vagi-phallic-anal—omni-genital, you might say. This focus is what gives the narrative its propulsive juice. After coming home, N. leaves Harris and does this over several weeks with a hard-won directness and clarity about what she wants, including a delightfully imagined scene of erotic role-playing as N. and Harris lovingly come closer to a way of saying goodbye. Eventually, a new romantic partnership in place, N. is on a book tour, having written the book we are now reading. All Fours’ finale, a kind of apotheosis of all that has come before, is a dance performance that N. attends in New York City. Davey, it turns out, is a dancer of almost transcendent skill; sometimes he gyrates and levitates high off the ground, as he does here. Comic narratives of old ended in a raucous celebration. Komos, from which the word comedy originates, means “to revel.” Davey’s dance performance is N.’s version of this ancient festival ritual.
This plot summary is important only to make clear the basic outlines of the comic narrative that unfolds: She’s unhappy, feels stuck and constrained, and the press of time and the gradual degradation of her bodily self make all of this especially urgent. Concerned now with whether she is peri-menopausal, N.’s capacity to attract and her capacity to fuck (in the varied senses this word can entail) are all she can think about once she is in Davey’s orbit and he in hers. With him, she is almost as open as she is with us. With her husband and child, she misleads and prevaricates. She risks a helluva lot in ways that feel super-exposing and potentially devastating. But she prevails. Not, importantly, in that things are consummated with Davey, but in that she succeeds in entirely rearranging her intimate world, her commitments to her husband and child, and, most importantly, her commitments to herself. Through it all, as N. says, she chooses “a life that [is] continually surprising.”
For my purposes, here are the urgent questions: At what cost? Does anybody in her immediate orbit die? No. How about developing panic attacks or having a suicide attempt? Not even close. Does her child Sam collapse from despair and need to be home-schooled? No. No? No! Does Harris fall into a depression and go on a drinking binge or fail to go to work for weeks at a time? Again, no.
This is the claim this book is making: Comedy can serve as efficacious resistance. It is possible to make a huge move, to risk close to everything, and to have it all come out better than okay. Compare this felicitous outcome to Lacan’s reading of Antigone to see the stark difference in what is at stake in All Fours. Antigone cannot refashion a social world such that it includes her desire to properly bury her brother. Having gone outside the law by burying him herself, she dies in “subjective destitution” and hangs herself in the cave in which she was imprisoned. So much for not giving ground relative to one’s desire![4] N. doesn’t give ground relative to her desire either, with an entirely different result, and not only for her. No one is left behind as she makes this big, wide turn; they follow her, each in their own way. A new world is created that includes them, even if they occupy different positions within it. Harris has a new partner and seems better than before. Sam rolls with the changes like the smart and centered child they are. Northrop Frye notes, “The tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated.” In All Fours, by the end, there are many converts. Through the publication of All Fours, numerous people have been touched. An article in The New York Times (June 8, 2024), titled “The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Life because of Miranda July,” tells us that the novel “has spurred a whisper network of women fantasizing about desire and freedom.”
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Comedy is serious business. To affect thousands, as July has, is serious enough; it’s another thing entirely to affect billions. Donald Trump’s compulsive and shameless reach for power makes it particularly difficult to consider comedy as a key element of his success (and we must fully acknowledge that if this word success applies to anyone, it applies to him).[5] My good-hearted liberal orientation was exposed repeatedly in statements that took the form “Can you believe what he just said?!” And how many times has some version of this exclamation of horror been uttered? What I and countless others found so shocking was exactly what Trump’s fans and followers found so reassuring and, at times, hilarious. I reluctantly came to this realization only after reading several essays by Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s rhetorical practices in The New York Review of Books. One piece especially made me sit up straighter: “Laugh Riot” (March 21, 2024).[6]
As O’Toole emphasizes, Trump has cornered a market that he himself created, and quite self-consciously so: the politician as flim-flam man, carnival barker—indulgently low-brow, coarse, gross, outrageous, and most importantly, cruel. This Trumpian schtick, so completely unserious that it has deathly consequences in exact inverse proportions, is one version of comedy as resistance—in this case, the persistent, inveterate practice of giving the middle finger to all who ignored him, belittled him, tried to control him; to all of us woke elites who traffic in identity politics and cancel culture. Of course, Trump is a proxy for those who count themselves as MAGA devotees, MAGA fanatics, many of whom have felt similarly ignored, belittled, and ridiculed, and for whom Trump’s mischievous voice is singular, even perfect.
With Trump at its helm, the MAGA movement is commonly said to be retrograde; it has its sights on the past, as the “again” in the acronym suggests. In fact, entirely consistent with the comic mode, Trump’s project is about shaping a future world. Yes, it’s easy to connect MAGA to recurring themes and concerns in the history of social movements in the United States. Richard Hofstadter’s ever-relevant essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” makes this point plain. However, the engine of change here is propulsively forward-looking and focused exclusively on dismantling—delegitimizing and neutralizing—existing social structures, including governmental agencies, universities, research institutions, media companies, and the ideological commitments of liberalism. International relations and trade agreements are rendered moot by fiat. In “Laugh Riot,” O’Toole considers Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of medieval laughter in Rabelais and His World. Here’s Bakhtin, as quoted by O’Toole: “One might say that it builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state.” As O’Toole observes, “Bakhtin suggested that the ‘festive liberation of laughter . . . was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time, life came out of its usual, legalized, and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom.’” MAGA is one such liberated world.
“Trump may have cornered the market on cruel comedy.”
The festival atmosphere of the typical Trump rally can’t be overstated—obscene speech, brutal yet seemingly illogical action, and revelry are its key elements. Importantly, Trump does not indulge in sentimental feeling, nor would one call him nostalgic, even in spite of his slogan and the pronatalists he keeps as company. The jokes are brazen and often harsh. He leans into the most offensive moments, especially when he mocks the disabled, the infirm, and the cognitively impaired. The laughter he evokes arises not so much from genuine amusement but from how these moments frame Trump, and by extension, his audience, against a benchmark of acceptable behavior and decorum. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but . . .” serves as a typical preface to the next outrageous thing out of his mouth. His buffoonery, more often lately characterized by rambling and loosely connected remarks, is integral to his shtick—themes and topics come and go as he proceeds in leisurely fashion, shambolic, with time to kill. The phallic signifier has an animating, and for many a disturbing, role in the Trump idiom, from his preoccupation with crowd sizes and “small hands,” to his performing fellatio on a mic, to his fascination with Arnold Palmer’s seemingly enormous member. (The homoerotic implications don’t concern him: You know I love women, but let me tell you about Arnold . . .) His record of sexual predation simply gets folded into his outlaw status. Exaggerations, misrepresentations, and outright lies, so common in Trumpian discourse, are also essential components of an overall style.
All of this signals that he is comfortably (and happily) be - yond the pale of acceptable behavior, its boundaries brushed off with a shrug of the shoulders, and everyone knows it; most get off on exactly this transgressive move, over and over again. From the cadence and content of his speech, to his personal behavior, to how Trump selects his nominees for Cabinet positions and signs executive orders—it’s all of a piece. He is nothing if not consistent, which is why his followers see him as honest, truthful, and genuine in ways that baffle the liberal imagination.
Regarding happy endings and the fact that no one is damaged or hurt in the comic narrative, this holds true within the Trumpian world as well, in a specific and imaginary sense— that is, through the dynamics of identification. Even without the drama of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, in which Trump will be forever etched in the national consciousness with his raised fist, it’s justifiable to say that he never gets hurt—not felled by an assassin’s bullet and not meaningfully harmed by any legal problem he has faced.[7] “The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble,” Jerry Lewis once said. “The little guy against the big guy.” So it goes for Trump, forever playing the victim, forever remaining untouched. And because he is his followers’ leader, their “voice,” and the like, he and MAGA, in the Trumpian imaginary, are one. The logic here is pretty clean: If Trump survives, all who love him survive. If he doesn’t get hurt, then no one gets hurt. He transforms what would otherwise be trauma into something not only self-congratulatory, but also into a force that makes all who follow him stronger the victim of those blows becomes.
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In truth, it’s hard for me to maintain my argument regarding comic form and psychoanalysis, using July and Trump as specific instances, without also acknowledging a distinct feeling of abjection as I write these concluding sentences. Arguments regarding form and structure have their methodological purpose: to gain some distance and humility from the pulls of ideology and bias—in this case, the liberal bias of many a psychoanalyst. Emphasizing comic forms and applying them to July and Trump is an effort to see if it is possible to grasp the structural elements of something that is otherwise too saturated in feeling and all too often serves as an occasion for judgment and the aggrandizement of the one doing the judging. This is the discourse of the master—the diagnostician—I mentioned near the beginning of this essay.
But such methodological distance leaves unacknowledged the material conditions from which these forms emerge and the practical consequences of the specific actions these forms take or encourage. And it is precisely here that I could not help but be saturated in feeling. It is true that psychoanalysis has become a place where the comic mode has been forgotten. It is true, largely, that the tragic, traumatically based narrative has become so embedded in the psychoanalytic body politic as to be nearly unrecognizable as such and that the stories told from that place are very much and repetitively the same, a fact that should give us pause. It is also true that a conservative, heteronormative strain regarding how sexual desire ought to be channeled and how families should be constructed and maintained has characterized much of psychoanalytic thinking in this country over the decades. Though this has significantly changed, remnants of this strain remain: Monogamy and the conflation of sexual desire with love still hold sway as indicators of “mental health.”
Perhaps it is here, at the level of the family and its participants, where the intersection of the comedies of July and Trump illuminates an essential difference between them. In families, however structured, actual humans engage in specific actions in relation to one another and agree, ostensibly, to those specific arrangements. With July, we could say that the performative message of All Fours is this: If you’re going to shake things up in hopes of creating or finding something different—something that feels more right than what you have now—then do the work required to make that happen. Through that work, it’s possible to maximize gain and minimize damage. Moreover, families can have all kinds of configurations. Nothing is proscribed except chronic misery, and nothing is prescribed except having the nerve to make changes, no matter how small or big, as feels necessary. In this effort, sexuality, erotic play, and expressions of desire are all pursued for their own risky sake. As I’ve stressed, this effort to create something new and hopefully better is comic in its essence: unscripted, surprising, risky, at times crazy, at others pleasurable, and yet sometimes deeply painful. N. is not simply a “nice” person, clearly. At the same time, cruelty and the denigration of others have no place here.
But cruelty and the denigration of others have a central place in the Trumpian world and play a necessary role in Trump’s brand of comedy. But, as I said, the stylistic consistency is thorough. The indulgence in the obscene at MAGA rallies seamlessly extends to sexual tropes and repeated sexual assaults that have characterized Trump’s speech and actions over the decades, primarily serving to satisfy his appetite for subjugating women (and also men, in other contexts and for different reasons). Here, the practical impact of the rhetoric at the Trump rally, along with the millions in media dollars that funded his recent campaign—which extended, capillarylike, this vein of excess—is that it directly targets those who do not conform to the heteronormative American family (including trans-identified people, unmarried women, those who have not procreated, people seeking to terminate pregnancies). The specific sexual practices and choices individuals make about partnerships and offspring become opportunities for disparagement, marginalization, and hegemonic control. What might then separate Trump from his predecessors is that he is laughing while he does it. He has not cornered the market on cruelty. It was the Obama administration that first ratcheted up the separation of parents and children seeking asylum at the southern border of the United States. But Trump may have cornered the market on cruel comedy.
As I said, I am left with a bad feeling. My formal analysis only explains so much. My disquiet is the result of what remains. In this breach, the tragic returns.
It’s not unlike—and maybe is, in fact, close to identical— to the story Howard Stern likes to tell about his very first session with the psychoanalyst whom he went on to see for many years. Within minutes of their meeting, Stern is deep into his usual routine, brashly offering quips, cuts, and sarcastic asides as seamlessly as if walking barefoot on the beach. Only his soon-to-be analyst is not laughing or even smiling. Stern takes notice, feels uncomfortable, stops his act, and asks him why he’s not amused. “I don’t think it’s funny,” his analyst replies. “I mostly feel sad.”
[1] In an Instagram post after Trump was elected for the second time, July shared a screenshot of her first notes about the novel, All Fours, which she was about to start working on. She had penned this note days after Trump’s 2016 election and explicitly connected that event to her motivation for writing. Trump is nowhere to be found in the novel itself.
[2] Luepnitz, in fact, places Winnicott in the comic register in her paper “Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan,” in Between Winnicott and Lacan: A Clinical Engagement, ed. L. A. Kirshner (Routledge, 2011), 1–28.
[3] As Matthew Bevis writes, “In a fragment from Poesis, Antiphanes points out that tragedy is ‘a cushy art.’ Comedians have a much harder task: ‘we have to invent everything: new names, setup, action, second act curtain, opening.’” In Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013), 9.
[4] In Lacan’s well-known conclusion to his year-long discussion of the ethics of psychoanalysis, he says, “The only thing that one can be found guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire.”
[5] One might not have said this two-plus years ago, when four different felony legal proceedings seemed to have him cornered.
[6] That I needed an essayist in NYRB to enlighten me on this subject is itself a symptom of a greater problem with the liberal position.
[7] He recently announced a fragrance line for men (cologne) and women (perfume) called “Fight, Fight, Fight.” An illustration of Trump with a raised fist is on the bottles.