“My favorite thing about our current politics” is not a phrase I use a lot. In fact, it’s a phrase I don’t use at all. Covering politics today is a grim dance between the vicious and the idiotic, between repulsion and despair. It is the journalistic equivalent of bonking your temples with a ball-peen hammer. Repeatedly.
The hilarious Marco Rubio meme is making America laugh together
The jokes provide rare bipartisan smiles during vicious culture war.
The Washington Post
Except for the lone ray of sunshine that cut through the poisonous fog of the culture war, the one wan hope that escaped from whatever bargain-basement Pandora’s box launched us into this demented era.
I speak, of course, of the Marco Rubio meme.
For those who are not wasting too much time on social media, I can finally say you are missing out. Rubio memes are the most delightful thing to hit modern politics in decades. The entire family can enjoy them, from your MAGA uncle to your #NeverTrump niece, from your “resistance lib” cousin to your “abundance bro” brother. For one shining moment, we can all glance at our phones and crack a whimsical smile together. That’s something we could use more of now. And maybe it’s the only thing that can restore American politics to equilibrium.
The gag is simple. Remember when Rubio kept adding new jobs to his portfolio? First President Donald Trump plucked him from the Senate to become secretary of state. Next thing we knew, Rubio took on roles as interim national security adviser and acting archivist of the United States. Well, some merry memester figured out it would be funny to make pictures of Rubio finding out he had yet another job. Like “president of Venezuela,” which seems to be an early example of this meme, posted soon after the U.S. military operation in the South American nation in January.
Soon the memes were joyously multiplying. There was Rubio finding out he was the new manager of Manchester United. Or the new shah of Iran. And then there’s my favorite, the artificial intelligence-generated video of Rubio discovering he’s the new chief executive of Anthropic.
People who share the memes may have wildly differing views on the underlying events at which they gently poke fun. But whether you view the Venezuela raid as a triumph or a war crime, you can still get a good chuckle out of Rubio costumed up for a third-rate marching band.
Some readers will be tempted to respond that we shouldn’t make jokes out of terrible things. But this is exactly the attitude that is making American politics impossible.
Human beings have always told jokes about terrible things, because laughter makes those things slightly less terrible to live through. We make light of our failures and misfortunes, crack wise at funerals and in war zones, jeer at dictatorships and plagues. Because often the alternative is helpless sobbing.
Naturally it matters what kind of joke we tell. There are hilarious classic jokes about the stupidity of antisemitism and decidedly unfunny memes where the punch line is “the Jews.” But that’s what makes the Rubio meme so heartwarming. They’re something we can all laugh about, even when there’s nothing to celebrate.
I lived in Manhattan when the news broke that President Bill Clinton had been carrying on with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This was a highly polarizing event, to put it mildly, and my family divided along predictable lines. My Republican relatives thought it was an outrage that should end his presidency, while the Democrats believed it was a private matter being scandalously exploited by rapacious Republicans. prevailed. New Yorkers were staunchly behind Clinton and outraged at Republican overreach.
That didn’t mean they couldn’t have fun with it. Everyone — the traders at the bank where I worked, the real estate ladies at my mother’s office, the guy at the bodega — had a Clinton joke they wanted to tell you. The late-night hosts had a field day. Lewinsky, an innocent civilian who didn’t deserve to be the butt of anyone’s jokes, suffered too many of the shots. But most of the humor was comparatively gentle, a collective tsk-tsk at behavior we all agreed was wrong.
Today’s successors to Jay Leno and David Letterman traffic less in lighthearted, nonpartisan fluff and more in self-serious jabs designed to elicit what comedian Seth Meyers has dubbed clapter: an ecstatically enraged audience applauding remarks that tickle their political funny bone, but aren’t actually, well, funny. Some may see this as a sign that our sense of humor is progressing, but that’s true only in the sense that a cancer progresses. It’s a symptom of a terminally ill culture that has given up on any hope of finding common ground.
I’m not suggesting that Rubio memes can cure us of that disease. Like most memes, they have too short a shelf life to promise any lasting treatment. Already, they are rarer and less funny than they used to be, and soon the internet will turn to something else. But the spirit that animates them doesn’t have to die. As long as Americans push past partisan differences and laugh together, then there’s still a chance we can find more enduring points of agreement.