The laugh is on the Democrats

NEW YORK — The American comedian Tony Hinchcliffe caused a scandal in the days before the US presidential election with his jokes at Donald Trump’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden. As an opener to what the New York Times called a “carnival of grievances”, Hinchcliffe insulted Puerto Rico (“a floating island of garbage”), Latinos (too “many of them” who “love making babies”), black people (watermelon eaters), Palestinians (rock throwers), and so forth.

Many people, not only liberals and minorities, were outraged. They even assumed that this kind of bigotry would hurt Trump’s chances of winning – Latinos would all surely vote for Kamala Harris. They were wrong. Hinchcliffe’s brand of humour helped Trump, or at least didn’t hurt him: 46 per cent of self-identified Hispanic voters cast their ballots for him.

Hinchcliffe, a 40-year-old who grew up in a rough part of Ohio and is now based in Texas, loves to shock. His act is what is known as “insult comedy”. Roasting celebrities, as well as audience members, is what drives his brand of humour.

There is a rich tradition of this kind of comedy in the United States. Hinchcliffe is an admirer of the late Jewish comedian Don Rickles, also known as the “Merchant of Venom”. Rickles insulted everyone, from Italians, Poles, Blacks and Jews to his celebrity friends, including Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, and even himself. But his eye-winking disclaimers made sure that few people took serious umbrage.

A much sharper and more scandalous performer than Rickles was Lenny Bruce, the stand-up comedian who deliberately swore and used slurs to reveal the hypocrisy of a society that insisted on verbal propriety while tolerating racial abuse, police violence and political corruption. Bruce was arrested in 1961 for using “obscene” words in his act. Despite being acquitted, he was banned from television and hounded by the police until his death five years later.

What mattered most to Bruce was freedom of speech. The job of a comedian, in his view, was to push the boundaries of good taste and social convention. Hinchcliffe agrees. “My stance is that comedians should never apologise for a joke, should never stop working if everyone comes after them, and should never slow down,” he explained in an interview in April.

But there is an important difference between Bruce and Hinchcliffe. Bruce was a hipster who modeled his routines after free jazz and immersed himself in the countercultural world of the beat poets, Black music, and the sexual revolution. He was supported by artists and intellectuals who saw themselves as part of a “progressive” avant-garde.

Hinchcliffe, by contrast, made his remarks at a rally for the Republican Party. The people who cheered him are by no means progressive. Rather, they have unabashedly embraced Trump, who calls immigrants “criminals” and “rapists”, repeats made-up stories about Haitian Americans eating people’s pets, and talks of locking up his opponents and crushing his critics. Like other media figures in Trumpworld, Hinchcliffe wants the freedom to be a bigot, which is a far cry from Bruce’s plea for greater tolerance.

But to see Bruce as progressive and Hinchcliffe as conservative misses the point. Hinchcliffe, like Trump, is by no means a conservative, but a rebel against a stuffy establishment – much like Bruce, who targeted the powerful, the businessmen, the puritans, the squares. The same, in a way, can be said about Hinchcliffe, who upsets the elites who dominate America’s universities, media organisations, publishing houses, museums, foundations and NGOs.

Trump voters largely feel excluded and despised by these entitled urban professionals. They are the “deplorables”, to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase, who do not subscribe to the views on gender, race, and social justice that have consumed the country’s rarefied institutions and are tired of being lectured and condescended to.

Trump’s victory is not a triumph of conservatism, but the very opposite; it is a rebellion of the culturally dispossessed who feel politically empowered by a self-professed outsider promising radical change. That includes Hispanic people who don’t want to be called Latinx, and quite a few Black men, too.

Trump himself is a kind of insult comedian. The coarseness of his jokes is why so many people like him. And the more the New York Times and other organs of the cultural establishment are enraged by his antics, the more his appeal grows.

Many liberals who are rightly dismayed by Trump’s election victory might be tempted to blame it on the racism and bigotry of his voters. But this would be a grave mistake. The Democrats cannot win back the trust of large numbers of American voters outside the big cities and college towns by being a party of the elites. And without the support of people who lack college degrees, as well as evangelicals and rural voters, the Democrats are doomed to failure.

Liberals must emphasise class more than race, gender, and sexual politics. The culture war may win urban voters, but it will not significantly affect national politics. There are signs that Harris understood this. She played down her own background and largely stuck to bread-and-butter issues.

But it was too little too late. Her very presence in the race – a woman of color brought in as a last-minute substitute – stoked the rebellion against the cultural establishment. Hinchcliffe’s humour is indeed deplorable. But expressing outrage is less useful than understanding why he makes people laugh.

Ian Buruma is the author of numerous books, including “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance,” “Year Zero: A History of 1945”, “A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir”, “The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special”, “From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit”, “The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II”, and, most recently, “Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah” (Yale University Press, 2024).