The trouble with Weird Al Yankovic’s new presidential debate remix track, “Bad Hombres, Nasty Women,” is the same trouble that has plagued most comedians and parody artists in the last 18 months or so. Namely that Donald J Trump, the human form of those horrifying How Hot Dogs Are Really Made videos, is so wilfuly absurd that he has lunged beyond parody. Alec Baldwin’s uncanny SNL impression, for example, works because he quotes almost verbatim from Trump himself. It’s tough to ad-lib anything stranger or more unpleasant.
This means that when Donald Trump refers to Hispanic immigrants as “bad hombres,” there’s nowhere to go, no next level that doesn’t involve a trip to a Stormfront messageboard.
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So yeah, Weird Al’s “Bad Hombres, Nasty Women” is a fun parody and Weird Al is and always has been a genius who we should all be grateful to share a country and planet with. But by chopping up Trump’s lines and laying them over a beat, he actually makes the man sound more cogent, even when he’s trying to heighten the nonsensical nature of his rants. So “Mosul, Mosul Mosul / So sad, so sad / It’s a catastrophe / So bad, so bad” sounds way better than the stream-of-consciousness horseshit that he ran with Wednesday night.
We could talk forever about how comedy interacts with politics, how right-of-centre politicians spur on golden ages in stand-up and parodies, and how Trump’s candidacy has rendered this all moot. Instead, just go do what I, a foreigner, cannot. Fucking vote. We’ll deal with the comedy later.
Oh, and watch “Bad Hombres, Nasty Women” below.
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