Political comedy is dead, according to recent reports. Earlier this month, The New York Times published an article detailing “How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy,” explaining why satirical news programs are unequipped to effectively skewer the current Commander-in-Chief. In another exhibit of political comedy circling the drain, the conservative answer to The Onion, The Babylon Bee, received a full Times writeup as a popular source of humor for garden-variety chuds, all the way to Ted Cruz and the President. To give an idea of the no-holds-barred attitude of the Bee’s writer’s room, making jokes about Trump is described as “writing in hard mode.”
Our Cartoon President on Showtime could easily serve as an inverse Babylon Bee, if they treated Democrats with kid gloves in the same way. Viewers might be surprised with the sharp writing, which does not shy away from ridiculing either political party. (For example: When Barack Obama manages to find Joe Biden, he says, ”Drones aren’t just for Yemeni weddings.”)
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The show has one critical advantage to avoid the traps of other mediums, the program’s showrunner, executive producer, and voice actor R.J. Fried told VICE.
“For whatever reason, animation allows you to get much darker,” he said. But he’s not making any assumption the cartoon on a premium cable channel is changing any voter’s minds.
“That’s not really our responsibility,” Fried said.
With a cast featuring talents such as master impressionist and comic James Adomian voicing Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, music and voice acting from viral comedian-slash-singer Gabe Gundacker, and comedian-slash-journalist Ziwe Fumudoh voicing Kamala Harris, the show is far more than a pouty-lipped Trump impression you might catch elsewhere, and it does best when it’s ridiculing characters other than the president.
VICE spoke to R.J. Fried to hear how his writer’s room handled the president contracting COVID-19, and what might happen to the show post-election.
VICE: That day when Trump announced he got COVID, how did that transpire during your workday?
RJ Fried: I could give you—God, I know where I was when it happened—a tick-tock of the whole week. It was right after the debate. When we make these cold opens, we write them on Tuesday, we record them on Wednesday, we animate them on Thursday. Every once in a while, we’ll shift the schedule around if there’s something going on Thursday night, like the Democratic debate last year. It was almost done and then he tweeted this out. And it has happened before, usually we’ve been able to sneak in some line, sometimes we throw out entire cold opens. But it was definitely one of those things where we were just wrapping one up and it was that first 48 hours of processing: ‘which way is this heading? Is this ok to joke about?’ I remember having the same feeling after Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away. It’s obviously a very intense time, and it’s tough to calibrate where to put your flag down. In the moment, when it’s happening, it’s disorienting. We sat tight for a couple days, and let the episode happen. What turned the tide comedically is the images of Trump driving around Walter Reed with the Secret Service, and then it’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ Sure, he has this [virus], and we do not wish that to go south upon anyone, but when you’re knowingly spreading it to people who are doing their dutiful service on your behalf, it’s like, what’s going on here? We have to say something about that.
With a show that’s based on the president and the news, how do you head off the jokes that have already been made online?
At the end of the day, “Our Cartoon President” is a character study like no other that is out there. When “SNL” or late night hosts come on and do a Trump impression, they’re doing a joke that’s based on that day in the news and Twitter. We think much more about where the character of the president is in this moment. There’s much more ‘what are they feeling, what do they want,’ those sort of conversations. Just as a comedian, it offends my senses to do a joke that’s been thought of before. There’s that obvious trope: if two people think of it, it’s not that good of a joke. We are such suckers for originality, I try to hire writers that come up with the most ridiculous specifics. Try to get more and more specific, because the more specific, the more original it’s going to be, the less chance someone already said it.
It comes across in the writing that there are people who are logged on, probably like Gabe Gundacker and Ziwe Fumudoh, who might help inform that perspective.
We try to sniff out if someone is partisan. That’s a big no-no. If their Twitter feed falls into the hashtag resistance-y kind of humor, those are the writers we tend to steer clear of. It’s not clear that they are able to criticize both sides. Good writers are after the truth, the faulty logic of what’s going on, and how power and money influences Washington, whether it’s right or left. Wherever it is: politics, media, business, people who have a good sense of how it all works. And how certain themes are recurring. As opposed to, ‘Hey I really want the Democrats to win it.’
There was a recent NYT piece saying Trump is “impervious to satire,” have you read it?
I haven’t read it, I have to admit. I don’t love the concept of ‘this president has defeated comedy.’ There’s this notion that this time is more extraordinary than any other. I’m not necessarily convinced that’s true. We talk about how dysfunctional our government is. There was a Civil war. [laughs] People were going to war against each other. They were killing each other over their beliefs. We’re not there yet. It’s definitely a really intense time in this country, but the thought that this president is beyond satire or criticism, I would hate to be in a world in which we felt that way. It’s always worth pointing out that this is not right, this is what’s going on, here’s what the president’s thinking and the motivations behind it.
I was curious to get your take because the piece made me think it’s not that Trump has defeated comedy, but it’s more clear when political jokes are toothless now.
That has been an arc of the show. If you watch from season 1 to 3 of this show, the satire is much sharper, and it had to keep up with the president. The show got much sharper, much darker just to keep up with what this president is doing. We’re at the point where he’s at least in part responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, I’m not sure there is a joke that is dark or sharp enough to account for that. It’s pretty unprecedented. We’re constantly pushing Standards and Legal to let us take it further. The worst crime you can commit right now is honoring polite society.
Is there a challenge to establish who the straight man is, if there is one, to play off of, instead of being chaos throughout?
Yes, it is. It used to be General Kelly. And then he was fired on account of being the straight man in the White House. [laughs] Yeah, man, is there a straight man? Kellyanne Conway was it for a while, but now she’s gone. God, you’re so right. Melania, in some ways? I guess at some point there is this contrast with the Biden campaign, which feels like some level of normalcy or predictability. We’re referencing the real world so there’s kind of a reference point of what’s normal. It’s not like, Everybody Loves Raymond or something.
Are there similarities in writing for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and the President?
Did you ever see Triumph preparing Mike Huckabee for the Republican debate? Hogan Gidley was his campaign manager at the time, he’s now Trump’s Press Secretary, I pitched him let’s do this thing where Triumph prepares Mike Huckabee for insults. I think Trump does try to play into that. Anyone I know who’s interacted with Trump says he’s pretty hammy, back-slappy guy. I feel like there’s a lot of people that way. In his jest and all the things that guys at golf courses tend to do, it hides a lot of dark, corrupt behaviors. It allows them to get away with it. If he was just brooding and exactly the guy you’d expect, he probably wouldn’t get away with as much. He tries to make you like him, and I think that’s part of the behavior. There’s that saying the devil sits in the front of the church, I don’t know, you might want to be suspicious of the charming people in your life. What are they hiding?
In the event of Biden winning the election, can you imagine the show continuing?
In season 1, it was very Trump-focused, now it’s really all of Washington, and the Supreme Court, and the media, and business, tech billionaires, really everyone. Trump is in many ways just a symptom of rot in Washington-media-business-alliance. The bottom line is power corrupts in many different forms, and I am positive that no matter who is the next president, the next administration, the next Supreme Court justice, the next media figures, there’s always going to be a level of corruption. We’re going to continue to think there’s no way it’s going to get worse, and it’s gonna get worse. It’s all the same soup. This is a particularly bad batch, but the soup is always going to be there. And there’s always going to be stuff worth making fun of. There’s going to be more than one problem in Washington even if Biden’s president.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
‘Our Cartoon President’ airs on Sunday at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.
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