At this point in human history — in an era in which we have electric vehicles, widespread free pornography, moisture-wicking athletic fabrics, bubble tea, and erratic and extreme weather events for which we are responsible — you should not be surprised to learn that the president of the United States is a racist. He’s not the first racist president, of course! But he’s the one we’ve got right now, and his history of racism, in both word and deed, is extremely well-documented.

It goes back at least to the early 1970s, when the Department of Justice sued the Trump Organization for violating the Fair Housing Act, claiming it “refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available,” according to this Vox article (and lots of other articles). In 1989, he took out ads in New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty and its application to the so-called Central Park 5, who were accused — wrongly, as it turned out — of raping and beating a jogger. (Despite the overturning of their convictions based on DNA evidence, he still insists they did it.) Starting in 2011, he began insisting that President Barack Obama had not been born in Hawaii — which he was, with copious evidence to back it up — but instead was born in Kenya. Before, between, and after all of these incidents were many, many, many others. The dude’s a racist, okay?

His latest act, posted to the social media network he owns, is less elaborate, but possibly more blatant than ever before: a video¹ that includes a shot of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces photoshopped onto the bodies of chimpanzees.

This is where I heave a big sigh. That sigh conveys a lot: disbelief, exhaustion, annoyance, resignation, but most of all disappointment. To be clear, it’s not that I’m disappointed that the president is a racist, nor that he’s so shamelessly willing to show off that racism. No, I’m disappointed in how utterly boring and uncreative his racism is.

Depicting Black people as apes is one of the oldest racist tropes. As I understand, it traces its history back at least to the Enlightenment, when a more scientific understanding of animal species established differences between humans and apes that were moral as well as biological (i.e., we’re civilized, they’re savages). In the 19th century, that moral distinction got another kick when new ideas about evolution suggested that humans were descended from — or, as is widely and incorrectly thought, were more evolutionarily advanced than — their primate relatives. Now apes weren’t just savage but backward, left behind, inescapably genetically inferior. From there, the racism was a gimme.

It’s the easiness that bothers me so much. This racism is lazy and thoughtless. It’s not like you’ve got Klansman doing research on other primates to find the most insulting comparisons: Which is worse, bonobos or chimps, rhesus monkeys or lowland gorillas? Are they tailoring the comparisons to specific individuals they’re insulting? No, it’s always just: monkeys! apes! Black people! Don’t racists themselves get tired of the same old same old? Or is the trope so sidesplittingly hilarious that it still kills, unchanged, two or three centuries on?

Obviously, this is a very non-racist way of thinking about racist “humor.” And definitely a very Jewish way of thinking about it. Whenever I see things like the president’s post, I’m reminded of the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest of 2006, which was created in response to a Holocaust-themed cartoon contest held by Iran’s largest newspaper, which itself was in response to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. It’s a particular point of pride to say, “No one can make fun of us, particularly in a reprehensibly stereotypical way, better than we can!”

The results, alas, do not represent the best of Jewish humor. You can see ten of them in this Der Spiegel photo gallery, where they range from a “Jew Hitler” — Adolf in Hasidic garb — to a rabbi blowing a shofar that is actually one of the Devil’s horns. The winner, “Fiddler on the Roof,” depicts a silhouette of Tevye atop the Brooklyn Bridge on 9/11, the Twin Towers smoking in the background. I kind of like “Bleeding Heart,” in which a Catholic priest labeled “Europe” slaveringly gawks at the gigantic bosom of an aging Jewess labeled “Holocaust,” while an Arab lies dead at his feet — the priest has cut out his heart, labeled “Palestine.” All kind of obvious, pretty meh. The best cartoon, as Art Spiegelman, who helped judge the competition, points out, is really the contest’s own logo: a “glowering hook nosed spider astride a world in flames.”

The artistic failure of the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest suggests there’s a case to be made that racism can’t truly be funny. But that depends on what your definition of funny is. The persistence of “Black people are monkeys” “jokes” means that someone out there — i.e., racists — finds them amusing, but that, I think, is because their sense of humor is fundamentally different. For racists, and for assholes more generally, humor is directional. They laugh not at ironies, disjunctures, surprises, absurdity, but at people — at their perceived inferiors. Their laughter is a laughter of triumph, a Nelsonian ha-ha that shoves the upstarts and the uppity back into their rightful place (down below). I guess if you’re going to look at things like that, these racist jokes are hilarious.

In a weird way, there’s a tradition here that goes back to classical Greece. In ancient Greek comedy, you had two main stock figures, the eiron and the alazon. The alazon was, literally, a “boaster,” someone who considered himself superior — an overly proud soldier, a crotchety old man. The eiron’s job, meanwhile, was to cut the alazon down to size. Therein lay the humor: Who doesn’t long to see the puffed-up laid low? I certainly do, and the racists as well. In their view, they are the eirons, the Obamas the alazons.

The difference between racist humor and ancient Greek humor is that the eiron didn’t annihilate the alazon by photoshopping the braggart’s head onto a monkey’s body. No, he did it through self-deprecation, by understating his own abilities and allowing the alazon’s own failings and inferiority and hypocrisy to expose themselves. Shooting the alazon in the dick is certainly amusing. Handing the alazon a gun so he can shoot himself in the dick, however — that’s comedy fucking gold! And that’s what the racists consistently get wrong and will never understand, no matter how many times they shoot themselves in the dick.

For my money, which is how we Jews are required to phrase things, the greatest literary eiron in America today — the one using racism to hand every alazon a special dick-shooting pistol — is Paul Beatty. The narrator of his novel The Sellout (which won the Booker Prize in 2016) is a young Los Angeles watermelon and weed farmer who, over the course of the book, acquires a slave (Hominy Jenkins, “the last surviving member of the Little Rascals”) and reintroduces segregation on the buses and schools of his forgotten neighborhood. Naturally, he winds up in front of the Supreme Court, where, extremely baked², he conceives a theory of Unmitigated Blackness, defined as “simply not giving a fuck,” that encompasses everyone from Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, and Maya Deren to “Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations.” This book is nuts in the absolute best way.

And all Beatty’s novels are like this. In Slumberland, a Los Angeles D.J. moves to Berlin in the 1980s where he plays up every aspect of his Blackness — and spends occasional evenings at a tanning salon. In Tuff, a plus-sized Harlem drug dealer decides to change his life after a near-death experience, enlists a Black rabbi as his spiritual guru, and winds up a sumo wrestler, a generous Film Forum patron, and running for a seat on the New York City Council. (If Cord Jefferson is reading this, please turn Tuff into a streaming series!) Each of these tales stacks stereotype on top of stereotype, ties them up with tropes, then tosses them like a stink bomb into the genteel realm of American race relations. They’re over the top, explosive, so precise and outrageous that there is no other meaningful reaction but to cackle, chortle, snicker, guffaw, and weep deliriously over the myths and monstrosities we’ve all made ourselves believe in the last few amazing and miserable centuries. In other words, they’re essential.

Frustratingly, Beatty hasn’t published a novel since The Sellout, leaving us without what I hope would be a commentary on the years under this current president. Beatty works at his own pace, I get it, but at a time when the R word, trans gags, and sloppy AI editing pass for satire among a frighteningly large segment of the population, we need him — I need him — to weigh in. Whatever he comes up with will, I have little doubt, make fun of ineffectual “Resistance” liberals like me, but again, that’s what I need. It’s what we all need. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you don’t deserve to laugh at anyone else. 🪨🪨🪨