I grew up being raised [to believe] that Hollywood was the devil and that liberals are trying to like, murder babies. I was told a very simple worldview. Trump manages to uncomplicate the world for a lot of people. I’m on the phone with literal Trump voters once a week, you know, just talking to my own family. They don’t give a shit about, he fucks porn stars and he fucks around on his wife. They don’t care about any of his earthly sins. He repeats their own values back to them. And all they want to see is their values reflected in the world. The fact that we don’t all see Trump in the same light could be a reason for why a lot of the Trump comedy doesn’t hit.
I try to just highlight that he’s a bullshitter. Whenever I ramble in that Trump voice, I’m hoping to just sort of subtly illustrate, like, this guy just has no idea what he’s talking about. He just talks out of his ass and he’s pure Americana. He is confidence without substance.
[...]
Before COVID, when I was doing my Trump bits in front of people, I could sort of feel when, if I was getting a little bit more serious about how he makes me feel, how he makes me feel separate from the Christians in my life, how he makes me feel queasy about the rise of fascism — I just felt the audience pulling back. It doesn’t make anybody feel good. I mean, he doesn’t even make his supporters feel good. They feel like they’re under attack all the time.
Ultimately my job as a comedian is more important than my feelings as a former evangelical or a leftist or whatever it is. I have a job to do, which is to make the maximum amount of people in the room happy for a moment and take them on a vacation from reality.
James Austin Johnson @ Discourse Blog
And we need one now more than ever.
James Austin Johnson is a comedian and actor from Tennessee. After coming up on the evangelical Christian comedy circuit (which is a thing!), he moved to L.A. to try to make it in the mainstream.
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