The past year breaks down into a few eras—none of them, let’s be honest, especially funny. There was the period before the coronavirus pandemic, marked roughly for me from the start of the year to the moment, in March, when, sitting in a coffee shop and reading terrifying things online, I took a last good look at the strangers around me, realizing that I wouldn’t be sitting in such a place again for a while. Surely we heard a bunch of funny jokes back in our pre-COVID-19 innocence—in comedy clubs, or in movie theatres, or from the co-workers whom we used to see up close—but it’s hard to remember.
Then there were the long, doomy months of anxious stuckness, running from the spring to the fall, during which so much felt so acutely at risk. Very little about the pandemic and our inability to rise to its challenges makes for the good kind of joke, but we adapt quickly to new realities, and the urge to laugh, bitterly or joyously, persists. We got a glimpse of comedic timing, for example, when various political leaders tried to bad-cop their constituents into taking the virus seriously. In November, New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, responding to a question about people growing tired of wearing masks, said, “You know what’s really uncomfortable and annoying? When you die.” (The mayor of the small town of Walton, Kentucky, did an even more confrontational version of this bit, in a Facebook post this spring that began, “Listen up dipshits and sensible people.”)
And then there were the masks. There has, I suppose, been something pitch-black silly about seeing the many ways that people have misworn them—omitting noses, covering only chins, dangling them off ears. It’s macro failure demonstrated on a micro level, but at least we’re trying. On a hot summer day, I witnessed what could be the pinnacle of the genre: a man walking down the street wearing a pair of ski goggles, ostensibly as prophylactic, his mouth and nose uncovered but his eyes safe and sound.
Mostly, though, people of good will stayed inside and apart when they could, and the jokes were to be found on screens, maybe shared with those locked in with us, but better enjoyed alone, with our feeds. There was a sharp break from the lonely-together gloom on Saturday, November 7th, around noon, when the election was called—people joined up (too close for comfort in many instances) to shout and dance and sing, and see the world around them anew. With the celebration, a fount of humor burst forth: a weekend of great jokes—four seasons’s (of total landscaping) worth—compressed into a matter of hours. After that release, it was back to authoritarian gesturing, bad-faith trolling, COVID spikes, lots of doom-scrolling, occasional hope-scrolling, and maybe, every once in a while, a little joke-scrolling.
Here are some of the things that brought levity to a tough year.
Trump Talking Bleach and “Scooby-Doo”
The Donald Trump impression flourished in the final year of his term, and its most inventive practitioners explored opposite tacks. Sarah Cooper, a comedian and former employee at Google, shot to fame with the TikTok video “How to medical,” in which she lip-synched the audio from one of Trump’s April press conferences, during which he suggested injections of disinfectant to kill the virus. By severing Trump’s words from his person and linking them instead to her own inspired physical comedy, Cooper captured something new about the President’s petulant idiocy.
The L.A.-based comedian James Austin Johnson, meanwhile, went another way, using his own voice to nail the cadence and nonsense of Trump’s delivery, but applying it to absurd subjects like Scooby-Doo and Pokémon. In videos shot selfie-style on his phone, Johnson’s impression is uncanny in the eyes and lips, and he takes Trump’s obsessive, grudge-filled, free-associative style on a journey into the ridiculous. “We call him Scooby, but he doesn’t do,” Johnson says, in an imagined Trump monologue about the cartoon character’s shortcomings. “It’s a terrible deal.”
“Hamilton” in the Club
Michaela Coel’s series “I May Destroy You,” about a young writer in London wrestling with the practical and emotional fallout of a sexual assault, is no less devastating than its log line suggests, but it is also surprising, invigorating, and funny. Coel, who is the show’s creator and writer, gives a dynamo lead performance as Arabella; she starts out as a wall of wit and cool before collapsing into insecurity and doubt. She is also, despite her recklessness and flair, something of a nerd, as we learn during a flashback to Ostia, Italy, where she and her friend Terry (Weruche Opia) are enjoying a weekend on Arabella’s publisher’s dime. Out at a club, Arabella, who is on a cocktail of drugs, begs the bored Terry to stay a bit longer. Having already bugged the d.j.s, she promises, “They’re gonna play ‘Hamilton,’ the musical! ”
Mask-Shaming a Human Centipede
“Absolutely disgusting. I just saw a human centipede crawling around outside and the guy at the front of it wasn’t wearing a mask. How selfish can you be???” The comedy writer Keaton Patti made my favorite Twitter joke of the year—a gloriously gross goof on this terrible moment.
Searching for Michael Pence
Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” arrived at a particularly fraught time, in the days leading up to the election, and even brought Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani into the news. (The film found the former New York mayor in the hotel room of Borat’s putative fifteen-year-old daughter, making some questionable moves.)
But the movie’s brightest moments concerned another Trump associate. It’s undeniably funny to hear Borat pronounce the name of the American Vice-President, using the unfamiliar full version, “Michael Pence”—or, as a Kazakh official refers to him, “America’s most famous ladies’ man.” Borat, meanwhile, misunderstanding an infamous story about Pence, offers a short bio: “The vice-premier was known to be such a pussy hound that he could not be left alone in a room with a womans.” Nice!
Coffee Filters at the End of the World
Rumaan Alam’s novel “Leave the World Behind,” about a family from New York City that faces a vague apocalyptic disaster while on vacation in the Hamptons, is filled with so many casually piercing social observations that I could barely go a page without stopping to look away, awash in self-loathing. One of its memorably funny lines occurs during an early scene in which the family’s matriarch, on a trip to the grocery store, encounters a brand whose at once accusatory, meekly resigned, and conscience-stroking name has always struck me as amusing. “She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared!”
John Wilson’s Deadpan Vision of New York
