"In some ways, it’s never been easier to be a political comedian: the Trump jokes write themselves."

"In other ways, though, it’s never been harder: amid all the absurdity, the most consequential issues imaginable are at stake," writes New Yorker editor David Redneck...

Damn you, autocorrect.

That's New Yorker editor  David Remnick, writing in email pushing me to read various articles about "comedians who are helping us to understand and survive the chaos." They've got something about Samantha Bee, whose political satire is, we're told, “slash-and-burn” (which sounds like more chaos) and something about John Oliver, who, we're told, is "cable’s king of catharsis" (catharsis cures chaos?).

I'm interested in this idea that it's easy to do comedy now because "the Trump jokes write themselves," because I was just reading "SNL’s Toothless Trump Schtick Is Tired as Hell/After a record-breaking, Emmy-winning season, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is struggling to get laughs with its unimaginative Trump-bashing skits." 

That's by Matt Wilstein in The Daily Beast — published 2 days ago and thus not taking account of the Trump-bashing cold open on last night's show. Wilstein is particularly critical of comedy writing that is "barely an exaggeration of what the real Trump said during a speech a day earlier" (like when Alec Baldwin's comic Trump told the mayor of San Juan, "I don’t know if you know this, but you’re on an island in the water, the ocean water, big ocean, with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite," after real Trump had said, "This is an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water").

Last summer, before Baldwin had started playing Trump, author Malcolm Gladwell used another iconic SNL impression—Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin—to denounce what he viewed as the show’s “toothless” satire problem. Like Baldwin, Fey would often just repeat what Palin had actually said for comic effect. “They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way she talks,” Gladwell said on his podcast. “But the way she talks is not the problem.” The same could be said for Baldwin’s Trump.

And that’s the same critique that John Oliver levied this week on Late Night with Seth Meyers, albeit without naming Baldwin or SNL. “It’s easy to do bad comedy, because you just need to repeat what he says,” Oliver said. “And that’s not a joke, that’s repetition. Whereas comedy, especially if you want to try to do something that’s not just happening online all the time, is an effort.”

If it's easy, you're doing it wrong. That seems to be the proposition.

What I'd say is: Those who want to do anti-Trump humor need to understand that Trump himself is a comedian. I'm not saying Trump is just a clown, and it's crazy that we made a clown President. I'm saying, whatever his worth as human being carrying out the duties of the presidency, he is also a comic talent, with many humorous insights, great timing, and — like the greatest comedians — he's challenging us to see what's funny and what's serious as he mixes it up and causes anxiety that we can relieve if we climb out of the ocean of confusion and onto the island of laughter.

You don't have to like any given comedian, and a comedian who wields tremendous political power is going to fail to amuse most people. In fact, whatever your politics, you're not going to be a very funny comedian if you just think of the President as a wonderful humorist and laugh at his jokes. But you should understand the way in which he means to be funny and project yourself into the minds of the many people who do respond to his humor. You should do this, not because he deserves respect, but because it's the foundation for writing better humor yourself.

If you've been finding it easy to make fun of Trump, you are not working hard enough. It's like trying to write a brief in a hard legal case and believing your adversary's arguments are just stupid. You'd better understand the way they make sense and the thinking of the people who might hear these arguments as cogent or you're not doing it right.