Our Punchline-in-Chief

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, October 22, 2021

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was incorrect when he averred that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But, if we tweak his aphorism just a little, we will arrive quickly at the truth: There are no second acts in American lives once the American in question has become a joke.

 

Joe Biden has become a joke.

 

I do not mean this as a sharp criticism, but quite literally. Joe Biden is a meme. He is a punchline. He is a source of mirth and amusement. Worse still, he is the subject of a series of jokes with which the apolitical and disengaged have become casually familiar. “Why,” I hear it asked, “has Biden fallen so far, so quickly in the public’s estimation, and why has he not recovered?” The answer to both questions is that he is inspiring the wrong response in the public at large. Disappointment can be addressed. Anger can be quelled. Suspicion can be dissipated. Ill fortune can be reversed. But mockery is another matter altogether: In politics, ridicule — that freewheeling cousin of contempt and derision — has a nasty habit of becoming permanent. “They laugh that win,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed. And they who are laughed at, lose.

 

Biden has been president for less than a year, and yet his foibles are already as familiar to the country as would be a lame-duck two-termer’s. A pair of my news-junkie friends like to lighten up political events with customized, college-style drinking games, in which the participants are obliged to take a sip of whatever is on the menu whenever a predetermined figure takes an action on their list. (“He said, ‘War on Women’!” Drink!”) From what I have seen of last night’s unsolicited and unwise presidential town hall, I can only expect that both of them are in the hospital.

 

Pace Evelyn Waugh, it’s not just the “mixture” that gets you, but the quantity, too, and when Joe Biden puts on a show, he leaves nobody wanting more. In January, when Biden took his oath of office, a few commentators predicted that he would represent a “return to normalcy” after the prolonged P. T. Barnum spectacle that was the Trump administration. Instead, we got a pasquinade, with the protagonist cut out of the joke. Scripted, unscripted, in-the-round — it doesn’t matter: Each and every Biden performance is marked out by the man’s remarkable inability to speak intelligible English; by his obvious struggle to remember key names, job titles, or what he currently does in Washington; by his grating use of ersatz, down-home monikers such as “folks”; by his mysterious proclivity to ramble aloud about what “they” have told him to do (“they told me not to take questions,” he often says to a perplexed press); and, increasingly, by a series of jarring physical idiosyncrasies of the sort one night expect to see in a Mike Judge cartoon. Last night, while waiting for Anderson Cooper to rush nervously through a question, Biden stuck both of his arms out at 90 degrees and tightly clenched his fists, as if he were expecting to be strapped unceremoniously into a jetpack. What he was doing, nobody knew. But they knew it was funny.

 

Everyone does.

 

In Washington, D.C., it is normal to talk about politicians much differently than they’re talked about almost anywhere else — walk into a Starbucks anywhere near Capitol Hill and you will hear people discussing the SALT deduction in a manner that in most other places would serve as plausible grounds for a straitjacket — and yet, little by little, and always without any substantive politics attached, I have noticed the Biden jokes creep in to the imagination of the broader citizenry. At a friendly tennis match recently, I heard an older gentleman excuse his having forgotten the score by explaining that he was having a “Biden moment.” At dinner, people who lose their train of thought mid-sentence, as if they have been hit by a Mack truck, have started to say, casually, “Oh dear, I sound like the president.” And then there are the memes and images and jokes that are sent around ad nauseam, and all have the same achromatic presumption: that Joe Biden guy is inadvertently hilarious.

 

Last week, I saw a guy in my local supermarket wearing a shirt that read, “Buy a man eat fish. The day. Teach man. To life time. — Joe Biden.” I’ve never witnessed so many tickled compliments being paid to a piece of clothing. But then, we’ve never had a president quite like this one.