Stop Being Funny

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

Speaking Sunday night at the Trump Kennedy Center, where he was receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Bill Maher offered an excellent bit of advice for politicians who do not wish to be mocked:

 

“Stop being funny.”

 

It is a simple thing, and a not-so-simple thing.

 

When politicians are being ridiculous, Maher said, “I put them in jokes—jokes that work.” Jokes that work is the key thing. It is axiomatic in comedy that the way to kill a joke is to explain it, but it is worth thinking about why and how Maher’s jokes, and other jokes about politicians, work. If politicians are to stop being funny, then they will need to answer the question: When are politicians funny?

 

For one, politicians are funny when they are needy—especially when they show themselves to be in desperate need of attention and adulation. Pete Hegseth’s risible workout videos are an example of this. Bill Clinton’s general neediness was both pitiable and funny as he tried to fill whatever awful vacancy is at the center of him with junk food and junk sex. Donald Trump’s pharaonic megalomania is both disturbing and hilarious, even if the scolds insist that there is nothing to laugh about in such times as these. Jill Biden’s insistence upon calling herself “Dr. Biden” is funny. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s need to swan around at the Met Gala while pretending to be an in-the-trenches class warrior is funny. European Central Bank boss Christine Lagarde’s constant sophomoric LinkedIn posting, which makes her look like she is desperately seeking employment, is eminently mockable.

 

Beyond neediness, politicians—and media figures and activists—also are funny when they are unreasonable. Ross Perot’s mania was a gift to Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey and other satirists. There is a reason everybody makes fun of vegans, Bible-thumpers, libertarians, and the fading memory of Greta Thunberg. Humor is one of the ways we try to keep politics inside the 40-yard lines—extremists are inviting targets for satire. About half of The Blues Brothers is an extended riff on the ridiculousness of George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party.

 

Politicians also are funny when they are transparent. The late Rev. Jesse Jackson has a complicated legacy, but he understood himself as a performer and understood that others knew his preacherly cadence and soaring, moralistic rhetoric were a device, something he could turn on and off—which is why he himself sometimes had a good laugh about it, for example in his famous reading of Green Eggs and Ham. That Jackson also was a moral hypocrite was understood without a literal nod and wink. Similarly, the jaw-clenching patrician William Weld could laugh at himself, informing critics who insisted that he was pampered and out of touch that “the Welds arrived in 1630 with only the shirts on their backs and 2,000 pounds of gold.” William F. Buckley’s mayoral campaign was a publicity stunt. Everybody knew it, and Buckley himself acknowledged it when he declared that, if he won, he would immediately “demand a recount.” Bob Dole did not try very hard to hide his bitterness about losing the presidency to such a specimen as Bill Clinton: “I want children to know that, in America, anybody can grow up to be president. Except me.” It was, as Maher would say, a joke that works. Like the man who affects a humorously curmudgeonly persona to mask the more profound misanthropy of his actual character, figures such as Jackson and Weld put forward gentler versions of their vicious tendencies as a kind of psychological and moral vaccine.

 

Politicians also can be mocked, at times, for their virtues, usually when they manifest themselves as too much of a good thing. In real life, George H.W. Bush was the kind of badass that dorks such as Pete Hegseth pretend to be. If you were a Japanese soldier in 1944, you didn’t want to see Bush coming—but by 1992 his excruciatingly self-effacing WASP style was an anachronism, and it was easy to mock him as wishy-washy, as a “wimp.” Mitt Romney’s let’s-not-get-carried-away-with-ourselves conversational style—I have heard him pronounce the sentence “I love data” with no self-consciousness at all—makes him seem as though he lacks the true politician’s obligatory passion, which, God bless him, he probably does. It also makes him seem like a man whose brain is running a software update in the background. For my own part, I could stand a bit more of that old Bush-era Ivy League leadership style, with its modesty, moderation, and genuine sense of duty, just as I could make room for a lot more unexciting and unexcitable politicians such as Romney. But I also recognize that the humor directed at these men points to the vices that attend their virtues: The old country club Republicans may have had a genuine sense of civic responsibility, but they also had a genuine sense of entitlement to political power; the data-driven pragmatism associated with Romney’s style of politics also is very often associated with a certain excessive plasticity of principles.

 

Naked dishonesty in politicians is funny. So is incompetence. So is howling demagoguery. Quiet, unshowy competence is not very funny. A program of prudent and gradual reform is not usually very easy to satirize. Being quietly good at your job—that is very, very difficult to mock.

 

Bill Maher is right. Politicians should stop being funny.