For gorsake, start laughing – this is seriously funny

If you thought Donald Trump was the high point of humour in the White House, think again. The Biden-Harris comedic duo are offering some serious competition.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Whatever the flaws of the Trump presidency, it was the funniest ever: the endless superlatives, barging through world leaders at summits, bizarre stream-of-consciousness tweets (remember covfefe?), Mexico’s elusive wall payments and, my favourite, telling a seven-year-old boy at Christmas on national television that believing in Santa Claus was “marginal at his age”.

Prospects for further amusement appeared greatly diminished, though, once a career politician, Joe Biden, moved into the White House. But how wrong we were. The Biden-Harris administration has supplanted Trump’s as the funniest US presidency. Not even two years into their awkward duumvirate, Biden and Kamala Harris have left a hilarious trail of practically weekly if not daily gags, injecting new life into the forgotten genre of male-female comedy duos.

The past few weeks have been a comedic triumph. The President, in what should have been a sombre press conference, said a 10-year-old girl was on her way to Indiana to “terminate the presidency”, a reading of the US constitution so broad as to make Trump’s January 6th advisers blush. In the same speech, channelling Ron Burgundy from Anchorman, Biden read out the teleprompter in full: “end of quote. Repeat the line”, taking the italics in his stride. That came soon after he fell off a bike while stationary in Delaware, building on a habit of falling upstairs when boarding planes.

For the Vice-President’s part, only days earlier, on her way to pay respects at Highland Park, Illinois, after the tragic massacre on Independence Day, Harris pondered what she might offer the grief-stricken city. “We got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are, because you have been forced to have to take it seriously,” she declared, after an en route tete-a-tete with her communications advisers.

Even first lady Jill Biden appears to want more humour in public life, describing Texas Hispanics as “breakfast tacos” during a trip to Texas this week as part of a bid to reach out to one of the Democrat Party’s erstwhile most supportive constituencies.

But the past fortnight was a mere crescendo in this presidential musical comedy.

In his State of the Union address in March, Biden said Vladimir Putin “may circle Kyiv with tanks but he’ll never win the hearts and souls of the Iranian people” – a poor forecast given Iran has just sent drones to help Russia in its invasion.

The Easter Bunny appeared to order Joe Biden about in April. Introducing his seminal pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, as a new US Supreme Court associate justice following confirmation hearings, Biden said America could be defined in a single word: Awdsmfafoothimaafootafoot.

Later that month he laughed about “accom­modating Russian oligarchs”, unable to pronounce the word kleptocracy, no doubt striking more confusion than fear into the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, in March, Harris, betraying a no less comedic style, gave what may become the most memorable speech of her tenure: “Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time, so when you think about it, there is a great significance to the passage of time, in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires … and there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”

The scriptwriters of US comedy series Veep must be envious of such inanities, which have included Harris using a French accent to address French doctors in November last year.

The administration’s humorous bent extends to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, illustrates with her regular press conferences, such as her unforgettable March wish to “take out the tanks”.

If all this isn’t enough, the endless drip-feed of pictures of Hunter Biden, the President’s son, smoking crack with prostitutes round out what is now, clearly, the funniest presidency. We can only await what the second half of the Biden-Harris administration’s term has in store.

US politics doesn’t have a monopoly on humour, though. The whole developed world appears to be resorting to humour as an antidote to the growing disparity between reality and rhetoric.

British prime minister Boris Johnson’s unscripted rumination on the children’s cartoon Peppa Pig before British business leaders in November last year was a valiant attempt to match Washington’s comedic drift.

And closer to home, last week the new Australian government announced a plan for a “wellbeing framework” after almost two years of on-and-off school, business closures and mandates that took an unprecedented sledgehammer to wellbeing.

We still don’t know the word that defines America, but we do know the word that defines the Biden presidency: mirth.

Don’t despair; we take politics too seriously. Our leaders have less control over the world than we like to admit. Harris, who routinely bursts out laughing during serious interviews, such as alongside Polish President Andrzej Duda in March when discussing the Ukrainian refugee crisis, seems to understand this more than most.

As we start to reflect on the serious years of the Trump presidency, we shouldn’t be too upset about this seeming decline of standards. Amusing governments are better than malevolent ones. From climate change to the pandemic, government promises have veered so far from reality that humour may be the best and only response. Politics is as much entertainment for the masses as anything else. If unsure whether to laugh or cry, opt for laughter. It’s much healthier.