On insult humor – Leif Weatherby in NYT:

‘Cicero could write a treatise on Mr. Trump’s use of irony, as he’s proved himself a master of humorous misdirection. Liberals tend to think that irony is a type of wit that is aligned with progressivism. But for nearly a decade now, if you went looking for comedy in American politics, Mr. Trump would have been your best bet for finding it.
Now that magic is gone. Politics is about communication, and when Mr. Trump is on, his humor offers a clear outline of his worldview. These days, he looks lost. The fact that Mr. Trump is less sure-footed as a comedian may be a harbinger of a more significant uncertainty — an inability to land the punchlines because he can no longer identify the right setups.
Mr. Trump, a real-estate tycoon turned reality TV star, came to politics by way of humor. Whether it’s true or not that he decided to run in 2016 in response to President Barack Obama’s roast of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, there’s no doubt that Mr. Trump’s rise through the Republican ranks was partly thanks to his uncanny insult humor.’

(…)

‘A recent post by Mr. Trump on Truth Social — his own social media platform — began, “I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race,” which sounds like whiny protest. It’s a far cry from such Trump Twitter classics as “Happy 4th of July to everyone, even the haters and losers!”’

(…)

‘The Democrats have been many things over the last few decades, but funny has rarely been one of them. Now liberals are having fun and the MAGA movement that Trump commands is, for the moment, in a defensive, resentful crouch.
The advantage of wit is that it allows you to pivot, to change the subject, to be nimble and to dazzle your audience, all while giving it the impression that you’re in full control. Mr. Trump once had that power. But when reporters recently asked him whether he would ban the early-stage abortifacient mifepristone, his answer wasn’t witty — it was so garbled that it was hard to write headlines about. Irony can often be hard to distinguish from incomprehensibility, and Mr. Trump too often crosses that divide.’

Read the article here.

Irony that is incomprehensible is mostly not irony anymore.

I know some people claim that Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger are incomprehensible. Sometimes they seem to be incomprehensible.

A Lacanian told me that you should only read about Lacan.

(Should we listen to Trump or just listen to what other people have to say about him?)

Trump’s insult humor became pedestrian. It depends where the humor ends. When you declare that you are better looking than your opponent, is it still humor?

I would say: magical thinking.