From Colbert to Kimmel

 It's no surprise that Trump has come for the comedians first. That, it would appear, is what dictators always do. 

Trump turned Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel into improbable martyrs for free speech because autocrats fear nothing so much as a joke. "His Majesty knew that a joke is a dangerous form of opposition," as the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski puts it in The Emperor—his classic study of the reign of Haile Selassie. And so—Kapuscinski shows—his Royal Highness would take elaborate precautions throughout the day to ensure no possible crack would emerge in his appearance through which irony or satire could enter.

So it goes with our modern autocrats right up to the present. One of their first acts upon seizing the state is always to ensure that no one in their realm will be able to chuckle behind their hands at the new self-appointed overlords. 

As an analysis of the Kimmel affair in the New York Times summarized yesterday: "the satirical puppet show 'Kukly' disappeared from Russian TV under pressure from Mr. Putin’s government, and Chinese censors banned online memes likening President Xi Jinping to Winnie-the-Pooh." 

And so, again—none of what Trump is doing should surprise us. It should not astound us in the least that he aimed first to fire Colbert; and now has come for Jimmy Kimmel; and many suspect that Jon Stewart (also employed by Paramount) will be next. The worse the tyrant the more he fears the commentary of the jesters. As the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once observed: 

One can judge the moral character of any regime

By the degree of danger it attaches

To being observed through the eyes 

Of a satirical poet. 

But the regime's hostility to humor—and incapacity to understand it—is also our greatest advantage. It means that they are incapable of wielding it against us. 

In his classic satirical novel Penguin Island, Anatole France casts himself in the tragicomic role of an unworldly pedantic astronomer—married to a prostitute—who involves himself in the Dreyfus Affair out of an improbable desire for glory and heroism: in short, someone eminently mockable, if the regime only knew how. 

What saved him and the other defenders of Dreyfus and of truth—France writes—was that their enemies never learned how to mock. "The gods, in their anger, had refused to those men the precious gift of humour." 

And so, instead of using the weapons of satire—they could only think to use the blunter cudgels of condemnation and invective; and thereby made their opponents into martyrs: "They gravely accused the courtesan and the astronomer of being spies, of treachery, and of plotting against their country. Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore grew visibly greater beneath insult, abuse, and calumny."

So too—the Trumps of the world have only made their adversaries greater. Trump decided that his latest attack on free speech would start with a late night comedian: someone who made his reputation starring on the "Man Show." In short—not someone anyone hitherto had taken seriously. 

And now, Trump has made Kimmel into a hero. He has grown visibly greater under the barrage of Trump's persecution. Someone I was vaguely aware of in my childhood mostly for making dumb boob- and beer-related jokes on TV; congratulations, Trump—you have now transformed him into a demigod of the Resistance. To quote Yeats—of the martyrs of the 1916 Easter Rising: 

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout. [...]

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,   

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.