In early August, the day after Kamala Harris selected the genial Midwesterner Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate, the man Donald Trump had chosen to round out his ticket took a question from a reporter in Shelby Township, Michigan. It was, as queries from press go, about as soft as softballs get: “What makes you smile?” And yet J.D. Vance hauled back and swung with all his might. “I smile at a lot of things,” he said, grinning, “including bogus questions from the media, man.”
In video of the exchange, you can hear modest ripples of laughter run through the crowd, but no one laughs harder than Vance himself. The same thing happened in July at a rally in Vance’s home state of Ohio. “Democrats say that it is racist to believe—well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” Vance begins. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I’m sure they’re gonna call that racist too.” On the dais behind him, a few supporters in MAGA hats chuckle softly to themselves, but you can tell that Vance’s jab hasn’t gone over the way he thought it would. “It’s good!” he insists, augmenting a mild trickle of amusement with his own hoarse guffaw. He shakes his head and points out at the audience. “I love you guys.”
The trouble isn’t that these are bad jokes. It’s that they aren’t jokes at all. There’s no distance between what Vance is saying and what he means to say, no dots for his audience to connect. At best, it’s humor of the “Stop hitting yourself” variety, the work of a bully masquerading as a class clown. But Vance doesn’t have the deftness to pull off the ruse, let alone the insight to hit his targets where it hurts. Trump’s free-associative rants can lead almost anywhere, but Vance’s quips are all drawn from the same well of barely concealed resentment.
Humor, or at least the outward appearance of it, played a key role in the rise of the MAGA right, filtering fascism and white supremacy through the recursive referentiality of meme culture until, as the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2017, “the distinction between a Nazi and someone pretending to be a Nazi for ‘lulz’ had become a blur.” Trump’s rallies were more like rock concerts than press conferences, a mixture of old favorites and improvisational riffs that could veer in any direction without warning. He couldn’t stay on message to save his life—to the extent that it became, perhaps deliberately, difficult to tell if there was any message at all—but Trump knew how to work a crowd. And he knew how to tell a joke.
A former Never Trumper who once compared his current running mate with Hitler, Vance has worked to adopt both Trump’s positions and his sometimes-pugnacious, sometimes-personable rhetorical style. But he lacks Trump’s feel for a crowd, to say nothing of the Apprentice star’s instinct, honed over decades of diligent self-promotion, for playing to the camera. When Vance attempts to be playful, as when he asked the proprietor of a deli in Kenosha, Wisconsin, if he had “any food here you really don’t like,” to bring back to the journalists on his plane, it comes off as simple petulance. Like that faux-chummy “man,” it’s an attempt to rope the media into a knowing laugh about their own drawbacks, soured by the sense that Vance isn’t kidding at all. The vitriol bleeds right through; he can’t seem to help himself. “I’m having a good time out here, and I’m enjoying this,” Vance told the press at his Michigan stop. “But right now I am angry.”
Anger and humor can be a powerful combination. From Lenny Bruce to Dave Chappelle, some of the greatest comedians in history have been motivated by a profound sense of outrage. But Vance can’t put enough space between himself and his grievances to turn them into jests. Barack Obama undoubtedly dislikes Donald Trump at least as much as J.D. Vance dislikes the fourth estate. But Obama’s Democratic National Convention zinger suggesting that Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” was rooted in anatomical insecurities landed because he delivered it with a light touch, looking off to the side as his hands moved in and out, as if he too were aghast that the former leader of the free world was making a dick-measuring joke.
It has become fashionable to distinguish between jokes and “jokes,” which is to say jokes that the scare-quoter finds acceptable and those that they don’t. But treating jokes that don’t make us laugh, even jokes we find offensive, as if they’re not jokes at all absolves us of understanding why other people find things funny. I rolled my eyes when Dave Chappelle opened his most recent special with a story about Jim Carrey refusing to break character on the set of Man on the Moon and turned it into yet another gibe against transgender people. But there’s no denying that it’s an expertly structured comedic bit, leading those in the audience into one set of assumptions before pulling the rug out from under them, even if that bit is in service to a particularly odious kind of bigotry. And because Chappelle has successfully purged his audience of anyone who might find it offensive, the bit kills.
Vance, however, tells “jokes,” where the humor’s only purpose is to camouflage the bitterness beneath. (He tried to explain his infamous dismissal of “childless cat ladies” as a “sarcastic remark” blown out of proportion by a biased press.) And even with his intended audience, his attempted quips land with a splat. At minimum, cracking a successful joke relies on an ability to read the room, a skill that’s as important for a politician on the campaign trail as it is for a comedian on open-mic night. And though Vance’s journey from rural poverty to Silicon Valley to the halls of Congress ought to make him an adept code-switcher—a scene in the movie version of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy finds him studying the right way to say the word syrup—it seems as if he’s spent so much time in the hermetically sealed world of D.C. think tanks and right-wing podcasts that he’s lost the ability to hear how he sounds to people outside it. How can you put yourself in an audience’s shoes when your politics is rooted in a radical rejection of empathy itself?
On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver compared Vance’s strained laughter to the sound of a person who’s never heard a word spoken aloud trying it out for the first time. And his apparent uneasiness with a reaction so elemental that babies master it within their first six months dovetails with the sense that he’s generally uncomfortable with normal human interactions—that he is, in a word, weird. Last week, Vance dropped by a doughnut shop in the crucial state of Georgia, where the latest polls show Trump with a razor-thin margin, for some face time with the locals. But because his advance team failed to secure a friendly location, Vance instead found himself making painfully awkward small talk with a doughnut-shop worker who didn’t want to be seen on camera, let alone be part of an unofficial campaign ad. When Vance says he’s running for vice president, she replies with an unenthusiastic “OK.” Compare that with the beaming faces of the workers who rush out of the kitchen to shake Tim Walz’s hand as he strolls into a fast-food joint in his native Nebraska.
Vance’s doughnut-shop stop is the stuff of comedy, but only at his expense. By the end of the day, the clip of his uncomfortable exchange had been synced to the music from Veep, whose political animals can barely disguise their disgust for the rubes whose votes they must nonetheless court. Poking fun at Trump may have lost its shine, but Vance is a fresh and irresistible target. An absurdist, made-up Twitter gag about a childhood sexual encounter with a piece of household furniture went viral to the point that merely mentioning the word couch at the DNC was enough to break up the crowd, and on TikTok, dueling Vance impressionists riff on his off-putting public persona. That Vance isn’t in on the joke—and that the couch gag, ridiculous as it was, still managed to occasion some concern-troll scolding about people who might take it for fact—only adds to the fun.
Laughter can bring people together, but it can also divide them into those who get it and those who don’t. Leftist shitposters glory in the political establishment’s distaste for couch jokes, and Republicans chuckle when Vance says that Democrats chose Chicago for their convention so that Tim Walz “could actually accurately say that he visited a combat zone.” (A CNN reporter countered that the site had been selected long before Harris chose Walz as her running mate, and Vance responded, “lmao.”) Like the evangelical slogans that fly past the heads of centrist pundits, some of Vance’s comments are aimed more at eliciting nods from the faithful than laughs from the crowd. If you’re baffled when Vance mentions Swiss cheese at a Philadelphia cheesesteak stand, it’s not meant for you. If you know, you know.
By that measure, the fact that I don’t laugh at Vance’s jokes might be counted as proof of their success. They’re meant to bewilder the media and the leftist elites, at least when they’re not outright insulting them. But even Trump loyalists don’t seem to care much for Vance. He closed out the RNC with record negatives, and the numbers have only gotten worse since then. The right joke can win over a crowd, but the wrong one can turn it against you.
Trump may have the instincts of an entertainer, but the party he has built is institutionally suspicious of unbridled laughter. The online right’s unofficial emblem is the mocking cry–laugh emoji, a spiteful snigger drained of the invitation to join in. When it came time to bestow a derisive nickname on his opponent, Trump went with “Laffin’ Kamala,” and attack ads drenched her mirthful guffaw in an ominous echo. In 2015 Trump paired a laughing Hillary Clinton with the burning wreckage of Benghazi to demonic effect, but the attack on Harris appeared simpler: She was a lightweight, a second-string replacement without the gravitas befitting the nation’s highest office. In both cases, laughter was portrayed as weak and feminine, in contrast to Trump’s hypermasculine stoicism. “Laughing is to make yourself vulnerable,” Trump’s niece Mary Trump told Slate in 2020. “It’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control. And that can’t happen. That is not allowed to happen.”
But “Laffin’ Kamala” didn’t stick. Trump, throwing spaghetti at the wall, switched to “Lyin’ Kamala” and “Crazy Kamala,” while the Democrats made joy an unofficial watchword of their convention. And in Walz, Harris found a running mate who’s only too willing to laugh, even at himself. In a video released by their campaign, Walz tells Harris about his love of “white-guy tacos,” joking that Minnesotans can’t handle anything spicier than black pepper. It’s the mildest, most inoffensive of gags, and yet Trump’s supporters managed to take offense anyway, with a New York Post columnist dubbing Walz “the Uncle Tom of white rural males.” What bothers them, I think, isn’t Walz’s toothless quip but his willingness to humble himself, especially in front of a Black woman—to be the object of the gag rather than its author. People like J.D. Vance are used to telling others to laugh it off, but they don’t like it when the joke’s on them.
