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5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

“Sorry folks, but Donald Trump is funny. Intentionally funny.”

March 21, 2018 By Kathy Shaidle

Damian Reilly writes:

Worse, they’re going to have to admit that he’s funny for precisely the reason that Hillary Clinton isn’t: because he’s able to laugh at himself.

Did you see him at CPAC? He bought the house down. Halfway through his speech he seemed to drift off into a kind of reverie. Leaning on the lectern, he saw himself on the monitors. “What a nice picture. Look at that. I’d love to watch that guy speak.” (…)

Trump’s humour, I think, is archetypally mercantile – the laughter of business. It’s the comedy of a man who understands the exquisite pleasure of stiffing and the equally dreadful agonies of being stiffed. His gags are the gags of the guy on the make – a character from a Philip Roth novel, or a Martin Scorsese movie – a man who understands that in life you pay for everything. He’s aware, in other words, that in suffering there is comedy and that life is an inherently funny business.

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