Trump: A Semiotic Analysis

1 Introduction

This analysis uses semiotic theory applied to Donald Trump’s relation to traditional culture codes, his hair, his facial expressions, his use of metaphor and other similar topics, in an attempt to understand something about his image and his behavior as a candidate for president and as the president. I begin with culture codes.

2 Culture codes

Semioticians argue that there are certain codes found in culture that shape our thinking and behavior. I believe that what we call “culture” is really a collection of different codes that we internalize, as we grow up, and which shape much of what we do for the rest of our lives.

Clotaire Rapaille, a French psychoanalyst and marketing expert, dealt with codes in his book The culture code: An ingenious way to understand why people around the world live and buy as they do (2006). Rapaille was greatly concerned with what he called “imprints,” which he defined as combinations of experiences and accompanying emotions. As he explains:

Once an imprint occurs, it strongly conditions our thought processes and shapes our future actions. Each imprint helps make us who we are. The combination of imprints defines us. (Rapaille 2006: 6)

These imprints influence us at the unconscious level. His work, he wrote, involved searching for our imprints so he could decode “elements of our culture to discover the emotions and meanings attached to them” (2006: 10–11). He suggested that most imprinting is done by the age of 7 because “emotion is the central force for children under the age of seven” (2006: 21). As he put it, he went in search of the codes “hidden within the unconscious of every culture.”

His book deals with the imprintings and codes found in different cultures. In it, he offered an example of decoding cultures in his discussion of cheese (2006: 25):

The French Code for cheese is ALIVE. This makes perfect sense when one considers how the French choose and store cheese. They go to a cheese shop and poke and prod the cheeses, smelling them to learn their ages. When they choose one, they take it home and store it in a cloche (a bell-shape cover with little holes to allow air in and keep insects out). The American Code for cheese, on the other hand, is DEAD. Again, this makes sense in context. Americans “kill” their cheese through pasteurization (unpasteurized cheeses are not allowed into the country), select hunks of cheese that have been prewrapped— mummified if you will—in plastic (like body bags), and store it, still wrapped airtight, in a morgue known as a refrigerator.

The language Rapaille used is most entertaining and amusing. Americans, he said, mummify their cheeses and store them in morgues. For the French, cheeses are alive, and they keep them in special containers and let them get good and ripe.

The important point to keep in mind here is that from Rapaille’s and a semiotic perspective, cultures can be seen as full of different codes that the semiotician must learn how to find and to decode.

Marcel Danesi, a Canadian semiotician, offers additional insights into the nature of codes. As Danesi writes in his book Understanding media semiotics (2nd edition), published in 2018:

Codes are “organizational systems or grids” for the recurring elements and meanings that go into the constitution of anything that humans make, including rituals, spectacles, and representations of all kinds. They can be highly formal as, for example, the code of arithmetic in which all the structures (numerals) and rules (addition, subtraction, and so on) are firmly established. Or they can be highly flexible as, for example, the code for greeting people, which varies according to who the participants in the greeting ritual are. (Danesi 2018: 42)

A code can be compared to a recipe. This consists of information (a set of directions for preparing something to eat or drink) that must be converted into another form (the actual food or drink item) by someone. Note that the end result will vary according to the user of the recipe. But all results are still recognizable as having been made from the same recipe. Generally speaking, for some particular representational need, there is an optimum code or set of codes that can be deployed. For example, the composer of a work of operatic art will need to deploy at least three code-making sources in the construction of the operatic text—the musical code, the verbal code, and the theater code (all in place at the time of the composition). Needless to say, knowledge of most codes is culture-specific, unless they are constructed for international usage, such as mathematical and scientific codes. In these latter cases, the codes are part of a global system of education. In other words, people throughout the world have agreed on certain symbols to serve as a shorthand system for recording and recalling information

It is important for us to recognize that people in different countries have their own codes for many of the things they do and anyone who travels finds, for example, that people eat their dinners at different times, may eat different foods, and have culturally distinctive ways of doing many things.

There are codes of conduct that American presidents are expected to observe, and Trump has paid no attention to them, acting, many would say, in an un-presidential manner most of the time.

Figure 1

Trump’s hair (drawing by the author)

Trump’s elaborate comb-over is meant to disguise the fact that he is bald and thus is an example of lying with signs and duplicity, which is also manifested verbally in Trump’s compulsive and endless lying. His hair has become an icon, too, and his most important facial feature.

Hair, we must recognize, is a form of messaging about who we are or who we think we are or who we would like to be. It is Trump’s most important body feature and is used by political cartoonists to great advantage.

A description of the “mechanics” of Trump’s hair follows. It was written by Martha Ross and appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.

Ivanka Trump, as mystified as everyone else by her father’s famous head of hair, often explained the “mechanics” of it to friends, according to author Michael Wolff in his controversial tell-all Fire and fury: Inside Trump’s White House.

According to Wolff, Ivanka Trump said her father starts with “an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.” (Ross 2018)

It would seem that Trump has gone to great lengths to develop his hair style for reasons that have to do with his need to present himself in a certain way.

3 Trump’s body language

Trump makes use of the A-OK sign, with his index finger touching his thumb, with his remaining figures extended and making a circle of sorts. Technically speaking, this sign is an emblem and conveys meaning visually and doesn’t need to be explained. As Matsumoto and Hwang point out (2013b: 78):

A not insignificant number of most culture’s emblems are devoted to insults or obscenities. Emblems are true body language, with clear verbal meanings […]. Because emblems are culture specific, their meanings across cultures are often different and sometimes offensive. The American A-OK sign, for example, can mean “Ok,” “orifice” with sexual connotations, “money,” or “zero” depending on the culture.

Trump’s use of the A-OK emblem seems random. He uses it when he thinks he’s made an important point, but he uses it so often that it loses its meaning.

Trump is often shown seated with his arms crossed in front of him. That seems to be a defensive posture, with Trump using his arms as a means of “defending” himself against others and using the crossed arms, also, as a sign of his defiance.

4 Trump’s facial expressions

Paul Ekman, a psychologist, is generally considered one of the most important scholars involved with facial expression. On the basis of his research, he claims that there are seven (and only seven) universal facial expressions, plus one expression he describes as neutral (see, e.g., Ekman et al. 1992).

These universal facial expressions are, in alphabetical order:

1. Anger

2. Determination

3. Disgust

4. Fear

5. Neutral (no particular emotion)

6. Pouting

7. Sadness

8. Surprise

In a classroom exercise, I showed photos of Ekman imitating the seven universal facial expression and my students couldn’t differentiate one from another very well. Ekman explains that there are 43 muscles in the human face which we use to express our emotions, though some expressions (micro expressions) only last an instant and we may not be aware that we have shown a particular emotion.

Children learn early how to modify and manage their facial expressions based on the social circumstances in which they find themselves. We learn how to amplify or minimize our emotions, conceal our emotions or neutralize our emotions. Poker players neutralize their expressions to avoid giving “tells” (indicators of what their hands are like) which explains the term “poker face.”

It is interesting to speculate about which of these seven emotions Trump uses most. I would suggest that anger is one of his dominant emotions, along with occasional displays of determination and disgust.

In a report that Ekman and his colleagues gave to the National Science Foundation (Ekman et al. 1992), they asserted that:

1. Facial expressions provide information about our emotions and our moods.

2. Facial expressions reflect cognitive activity such as perplexity, concentration and boredom.

3. Facial expressions reveal truthfulness and lying.

4. Facial expressions offer diagnostic information about depression, schizophrenia and mania and about our responses to treatment for these afflictions (Ekman et al. Part I-B).

Trump’s extreme facial expressions are also of interest, since they can be seen as signifiers of his mental state. His mouth is expressive and often seems to be a bit distorted and his lips sometimes give him a porcine look.

Most of the assessments of Trump by psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists (who have never interacted with or interviewed him) are based on his facial expressions, his body language, his distinctive use of language, and his unruly behavior.

In a book edited by David Matsumoto, Mark G. Frank and Hyi Sung Hwang, Nonverbal communication: Science and applications, there is a long discussion of facial expression and what expressions mean. In Chapter 2, on “Facial expressions” (by Matsumoto and Hwang) we read (2013a: 15):

The face is arguably the most prominent nonverbal channel, and for good reason. Of all the channels of nonverbal behavior, the face is the most intricate. It is the most complex signaling system in our body. It is the channel of nonverbal behavior most studied by scientists. It is a channel than can reflect involuntary reactions and produce voluntary gestures. And arguably, it is the seat of the greatest amount of information that is conveyed nonverbally […]. One of the most important signals the face displays is emotion. Being able to read the emotional states of the person you are talking to is an incredible skill that that can help anyone whose profession requires face-to-face interaction. Being able to read others’ emotions can give you insight not only to their emotional states but their intentions, motivations, personalities, trustworthiness, and credibility. Emotion can inform us of malicious intent, hidden information, or downright deception.

Shortly after this passage, the authors offer a chart which contrasts emotions, moods, personality traits and psychopathologies. I offer their discussion of anger.

Figure 2

Analysis of anger (Matsumoto and Hwang, 2013a: 19)

This analysis of anger and its implications for other aspects of a person’s behavior seems to describe Trump very well. His anger, I would suggest, mirrors and has an impact upon the disaffected followers in his base.

Figure 3

Photos of Donald J. Trump (image credit L: Dominick Reuter/Reuters; image credit R: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)

We find an excellent description of the kind of anger we see in Trump’s mouth in Dan Hill’s book Famous faces decoded (2018). Hill describes extreme anger as follows: “Very taut lips part and form a horizontal funnel exposing the teeth.” Hill adds that with people who are extremely angry, “the eyes narrow and the lower eyelids tighten and rise, narrowing the eyes,” and that “the entire jaw pushes forward and the chin sticks out,” “the upper lip curls, the nostrils flare, and the skin pouches along the nose” (Hill 2018: 157). If you look at the images Hill offers in the book, they remind you of Trump’s photos shown above.

Hill lists various degrees of anger, with “Thunderstorm” being the most severe kind of anger and on his list, we find Donald Trump, along with a number of celebrities and politicians including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In Hill’s list of “least happy” figures, Donald Trump is first on the list.

It is interesting to go to Google, type in “Donald J. Trump,” and click on images. You get hundreds of photographs of Trump. During his rallies and the debates, he makes many extreme facial expressions which, I suggest, offer insights into his emotions and his personality.

The two I’ve chosen are illustrative of his extreme emotionality and suggest there is something driven about him. His hair is one of his most distinctive features, but his constantly changing facial expressions also suggest a kind of emotional as well as physical restlessness and, in the photo with the blue tie, an angry and menacing look.

In one photo his face is all contorted with his teeth showing and his mouth distorted. He is raising a hand with a finger pointing toward the ceiling, expressions of anger and defiance. In another, his eyes are closed and his face is curiously distorted.

Figure 4

A torrent of words (drawing by the author)

5 Trump-speak

There is a branch of Discourse Theory that deals with ideology and power. One kind of discourse analysis, called Critical Discourse Analysis, focuses on power and ideology. The quotation that follows, from David Machin and Andrea Mayr (2012) in How to do critical discourse analysis, offers an insight into their methods:

The question of power has been at the core of the CDA [Critical Discourse Analysis] project. Basically, power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and control subordinate groups. The aim in CDA has been to reveal what kinds of social relations of power are present in texts both explicitly and implicitly[…]. Since language can (re)produce social life, what kind of world is being created by texts and what kinds of inequalities and interests might this seek to perpetuate, generate or legitimate? Here language is not simply a vehicle of communication, or persuasion, but a means of social control and domination….While visual analysis has more traditionally been the domain of Media and Cultural Studies, linguists….have begun to develop some of their own models for analysis that draw on the same kinds of precision and more systematic kinds of description that characterized the approach to language in CDA. These authors began to look at how language, image and other modes of communication such as toys, monuments, films, sounds, etc. combine to make meaning. This has broadly been referred to as “multimodal” analysis. Not all of this work has adopted the kind of critical approach used in CDA, where the aim is to reveal buried ideology. (Machin and Mayr 2012: 24)

Discourse theory argues that language shapes reality for people and the language to which we are exposed has profound consequences. This theory is at the heart of the critiques many people made of Trump’s violent language suggesting it ultimately resulted in the killings at a Jewish synagogue and the sending of bombs to prominent anti-Trump figures by some unhinged and psychologically disturbed Trump followers.

Here I will examine Trump’s discourse and discuss its ideological implications. Here is what Trump said about crime during the first debate with Hillary Clinton which he lost by a large margin, not that it mattered in the election.

Well, first of all Secretary Clinton doesn't want to use a couple of words and that’s law and order. And we need law and order. If we don't have it, we’re not going to have a country. And when I look at what's going on in Charlotte, the city I love, the city where I have investments, when I look at what's going on throughout various parts of our country, whether it's...I can keep naming them all day long -- we need law and order in our country. And I just got today the as you know the endorsement of the fraternal order of police which just came in. We have endorsements from I think almost every police group, I mean a large percentage of them in United States. We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-American, Hispanics, are living in hell because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot. In Chicago, they’ve had thousands of shootings, thousands, since January first. Thousands of shootings. And I’m saying where is this? Is this war-torn country? What are we doing? And we had to stop the violence. We have to bring back law in order. In a place like Chicago, where thousands of people have been killed, thousands over the last number of years, in fact almost four thousand having killed since Barack Obama became president. Over four, almost four thousand people in Chicago have been killed. We have to bring back law and order. Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago, you do stop and frisk which worked very well Mayor Giuliani is here worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down but you take the gun away from criminals that should be having it. We have gangs roaming the street and in many cases they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants. And they have guns and they shoot people. And we have to be very strong and we have to be very vigilant. We have to be we had to know what we’re doing. Right now our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything. We have to protect our inner cities because African-American communities are being decimated by crime. (my emphasis)

Notice how often he uses “I” in his speech, making himself the focus of attention. He often mentions that he has property in a city he is talking about to suggest how much he cares about it.

His use of “law and order,” we must recognize, is his code for a more powerful police. The police, in recent years, have become militarized in many cities and now resemble an army in some cities. And Trump is trying to do as much as he can to further militarize the police, who, in his mind, are needed to control all the immigrants who he describes as murderers and rapists.

In recent months, there have been a number of shootings of unarmed black men by the police, which led to the Black Lives Matter movement. “Law and order” is a response to those who belong to organizations like Black Lives Matter and feel that the police have to be contained.

Trump’s characterization of African-Americans and Mexicans “living in hell” is meant to discredit the governments of American cities and the national government. Trump argues they don’t know what they are doing and only a person like him, who knows the art of the deal, can solve the problems cities face.

He argues that the violence in the cities – which he exaggerates – is caused by illegal immigrants in gangs roaming the streets in a lawless American society approaching anarchy. In this situation, he suggests, only he and his championing of the police and “law and order” can save us. His speech often has an apocalyptic tone to it and is full of wild overgeneralizations and lies.

Notice how Trump brings himself into the picture directly, saying that “Charlotte is a city I love,” and one “in which I have investments,” to emphasize his wealth and sense of self-importance. Notice, also, the rambling nature of Trump’s speech. He repeats certain statements over and over again, jumps from one idea to another, and speaks in very simple terms.

We don’t know whether this speech is a reflection of his mind or an attempt to reach people who are not highly educated and see the world in simplistic terms. It is known that Trump didn’t prepare for the first presidential debate, believing that his being himself would carry the day. “Let Trump be Trump” was a popular sentiment.

This debate was fact-checked and it was found that many if not most of Trump’s statements were not accurate. Many of his statements, such as his suggestion that the election has been rigged, are not based on any evidence. Newspapers now use the term “without evidence” in writing about many of Trump’s statements when they don’t say he is lying.

In fact, Trump has been described as a serial liar who has no regard for the truth, has been accused of misogyny, hateful speech, and demagoguery. A Washington Post Fact Checker site describes his lying as follows:

In 649 days, President Trump has made 6,420 false or misleading claims. (Kessler, Rizzo and Kelly 2018)

One article I found on the Internet claims Trump lied around eighty times in one day.^[1]

6 Trump’s use of metaphor and metonymy

Metaphor and metonymy are figures of speech that play an important role in our everyday speech. Metaphor involves communicating by analogy. Thus, we might say “my love is a red rose.” A simile is weaker form of metaphor and uses “like” or “as.” “My love is like a red rose” is a simile.

Metaphor is, it turns out, basic to our thinking. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain in their book, Metaphors we live by (1980: 3):

Most people think that they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphoric in nature.

The ordinary person uses many metaphors in the course of a day. And that is because we find analogies useful in describing and explaining things to others.

In his book, How customers think: Essential insights into the mind of the market (2003), Gerald Zaltman, a professor at the Harvard Business School, explains why metaphors are so important and argues that they are central to our thought:

Metaphors, the representation of one thing in terms of another, often help us express the way we feel about or view a particular aspect of our lives. For example, if a man says “My hair is my signature,” he doesn’t mean that he uses his hair to sign his name. Rather, he means that something about his hair signals what kind of person he is to others. This metaphor is therefore rich with meaning about identity, individuality and the significance of other people. (Zaltman 2003: 37–38)

Metaphors stimulate the workings of the human mind. By one estimate, we use almost six metaphors per minute of spoken speech.

Zaltman offers us a way to think about Trump’s hair that considers what his hair style signifies to himself and to others. In semiotic terms, our hair style is a message about ourselves that we send to others. Zaltman discusses the use of metaphors, which he describes as “the engine of imagination,” by marketers and writes:

Metaphors are so basic to our thinking that marketers and their audiences are often unaware of them. As we’ll see, market researchers can glean valuable knowledge by encouraging consumers to use metaphors. Why? Because metaphors can help bring consumers’ important—but unconscious—thoughts and feelings to the surface. Indeed, metaphor constitutes a powerful tool for unearthing the hidden thoughts and feelings that have such a profound influence on consumers’ decision making. (Zaltman 2003: 38)

The important point that Zaltman makes here is that metaphors reveal a great deal both about speakers and their audiences—an insight that is useful in examining Trump’s rhetoric.

An examination of Trump’s use of language in terms of his figures of speech – that is, his analogies (metaphors) and associations (metonymies) is revealing. He said in his debate that the inner cities are hell, a metaphor that he used frequently. And he added that the inner cities are being rampaged by illegal immigrants—an assertion without evidence.

Carmine Gallo analyzed Trump’s metaphors in an article for Forbes entitled “The metaphors that played a role in Trump’s victory” (2016) and writes about one of his most often used metaphors, “Drain the Swamp.”

Donald Trump didn’t repeat the mantra “Drain the Swamp” in his victory speech early Wednesday morning, but the metaphor may have played a small role in helping him to win the 2016 presidential election. It started with a press release on October 17th. Trump vowed to “Drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” Trump nearly discarded the line on the campaign trail. "Drain the swamp sounded so hokey, I didn’t want to do it. But I did it for one group, and it killed,” he explained.

Drain the swamp is a visceral metaphor which has been used by politicians to signal that it’s time to clean up government corruption. (Gallo 2016)

Gallo suggests that this metaphor spoke to the millions of disaffected voters who felt that the established leaders and governmental institutions had failed them.

Trump has also been described by his critics using metaphors. Aaron Blake wrote an article, “The many metaphors for Donald Trump” (2017) which discusses them in some detail. I list some of them below. They all suggest that Donald Trump is like:

• Godzilla

• A carnival barker

• A cancer

• An autoimmune system

• A grilled cheese sandwich

• A serial killer (after the media)

• A rattlesnake

• A game show host

These metaphors allow comedians, politicians and writers to help characterize Trump in ways that will resonate with the American public.

An article in the Hartford Courant by Rob Kyff, on “Trump the master of metaphors” (2017) offers a number of his most important ones. He lists some of the metaphors that have been used to describe Trump and explains:

But what many of these commentators miss is that Trump himself is a master of metaphor. Anyone seeking to understand his appeal would be wise to consider his uncanny, intuitive ability to craft compelling comparisons.

During the presidential campaign, he laced his pronouncements with vivid Trump-aphors: “drain the swamp,” “flood of refugees,” “rigged system.” He compared Syrian refugees to a “Trojan horse,” and, in one mixed metaphor regarding China, he lurched from describing the U.S. as “a piggybank that's being robbed,” to claiming the U.S. “holds all the cards,” to declaring “we can't allow China to rape our country.”

Kyff also mentions Trump’s simile about America having “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape” in his “this American carnage” speech. We must keep in mind that since we all speak in metaphors all the time, Trump’s use of metaphors resonated with many disaffected Americans who saw his metaphors as him “telling it like it is.”

Trump often describes the White House as “working like a finely tuned machine.” Contrast this with the description of the White House found in Peggy Noonan (a Republican partisan) who described the White House, in an article for The Wall Street Journal titled “Melania’s misstep and Michelle’s mystery” (2018) as follows:

The White House’s reputation for chaos, the sense that nobody’s in charge, that it’s all factions, head-butting and rumors about who’s going to get fired next. Wednesday Politico had a quote from an unnamed former White House staffer describing the atmosphere: “It’s like an episode of ‘Maury.’ The only thing missing is a paternity test.”

There are countless reports about the chaos in the White House and just about every day brings rumors of firings by Trump.

7 Trump and the restricted and elaborated codes of language

There is another aspect of Trump’s speech that is important – its simplicity. A British sociolinguist, Basil Bernstein (1977) did research on the linguistic codes found in children’s speech and concluded there were two linguistic codes children used: an “elaborated” code and a “restricted” code and the codes they learned played an important role in their future development and adult lives.

We can see this when we examine Trump’s speech which is very simple and in the Restricted Code. An article in The New York Times on January 9, 2018, by Emily Shugarman points out that he speaks at the level of eight-year-olds.

Trump speaks at level of 8-year-old, new analysis finds

Mr. Trump scores the lowest of any of the past 15 presidents

Donald Trump may call himself a genius on Twitter, but his spoken statements say otherwise.

An analysis of the President's first 30,000 words uttered in office found Mr. Trump speaks at a third- to seventh-grade reading level – lower than any other President since 1929. Mr. Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is “significantly more simple, and less diverse” than any President since Herbert Hoover, the analysis found.

The comparison is based on interviews, speeches and press conferences for every president dating back to 1929, compiled by online database Factba.se. Analysts ran the records through eight different tests for vocabulary complexity, diversity, and comprehension level. In every single test, Mr. Trump scored the lowest.

It is pretty evident, I would suggest, that Trump uses the Restricted Code when he speaks (and probably when he thinks) and this is the code that is also best suited for his audiences at his rallies. It is not well suited for discussions with the Press or politicians since it is so primitive.

Trump’s speaking in the Restricted Code may help explain why his thinking processes are the way they are: he is a prisoner of his Restricted Code manner of thinking about the world.

Figure 5

The fool (drawing by the author)

8 Humor theories and Trump jokes

All major political figures usually become the subject of jokes, of being ridiculed in political cartoons and of being satirized by comedians of one sort or another. There are comedians who wear blonde wigs and impersonate Trump in skits on shows like Saturday Night Live, there are comedic Trump impersonators, and there are many Trump jokes circulating on the Internet.

Humor is a complicated matter and philosophers and deep thinkers have been trying to figure out why we laugh for thousands of years—from Aristotle’s time to the present. There are three basic theories of humor: superiority theories, psychoanalytic theories and incongruity theories. These theories are what I call “Why” theories and attempt to explain why we laugh at jokes and other forms of humor.

There is no agreement among humor scholars about which of these “why” theories is best.

Figure 6

Aristotle (drawing by the author)

9 Superiority theories

The first, stems from Aristotle, who argues that humor is based on feelings of superiority and we laugh at people inferior to us. Aristotle said that comedy (a literary form of humor) is “an imitation of men worse than average,” who are “ridiculous.” Thomas Hobbes, another superiority theorist, wrote, in The Leviathan, “The passion of laughter is nothing else than the sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves in comparison with others, or with our own formerly.”

Figure 7

Sigmund Freud (drawing by the author)

10 Psychoanalytic theories

The second, psychoanalytic theories, stem from the writings of Sigmund Freud and others who suggest that humor is based on masked aggression. Because it is masked, the aggression in the humor doesn’t disturb the humorist and also generates non-guilty pleasure in those who are told an aggressive joke or who read some humor that is aggressive in nature.

As Freud wrote in his book Jokes and their relation to the unconscious (1963: 101):

[A]nd here at last we can understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service of their purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way.

11 Incongruity theories

The third theory of humor, and the one most widely accepted by humor scholars, argues that humor is based on incongruity and the difference between what one expects and what one gets. The philosopher Schopenhauer wrote “The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity (Piddington 1963: 171–172).

12 What makes us laugh

I have always felt that the why theories are inadequate because they don’t deal with joke texts adequately. So I conducted some research on humor with a focus on what techniques of humor are found in humorous texts of all kinds and came up with some 45 techniques which, I argue, inform all humor. And I couldn’t find more than 45 techniques.

When I listed my 45 techniques, I discovered that they could be fit into in one of four categories: humor of language, logic, identity and one I call action, for lack of a more precise description. My chart of these 45 techniques follow.

They are all explained in detail in my books An anatomy of humor (1998) and The art of comedy writing (which is about literary comedies from Roman times to the present, 1997).

In order to use the techniques more easily, I made another chart in which I listed them alphabetically by number. This chart follows.

I would argue that my 45 techniques can be used to show what mechanisms are at work in all forms of humor, from jokes and cartoons to literary comedies. I also have not been able to find additional mechanisms. I should point out that in some cases a technique is reversed: thus, exaggeration is also used for understatement, which is implied in the concept.

Some scholars have used my typology in their research, but they generally modify my list. We can use my list of techniques to see what mechanisms are at work in some Trump jokes which I found on the Internet.

Jokes, as I (and most humor scholars) interpret them, can be described as:

• Short narratives

• Meant to generate mirthful humor

• That end in a punch line

Jokes take the form of: A then B then C then D then E (the punch line) then, if the joke is good and the teller skilled, F: laughter. If the joke isn’t good and the teller isn’t skilled, you get fake laughter.

Figure 8

The structure of the Joke

There are some jokes that don’t generate mirthful laughter but very negative feelings, but most jokes aren’t like that.

Political humor is a means by which the powerful attack the powerless (in an attempt to dominate them) and the powerless attack the powerful (to salvage their sense of dignity and to get revenge). The more authoritarian the regime, the more biting the jokes and other forms of political humor. We saw a good deal of political humor from Eastern European countries when they were occupied by Russian troops.

One of the most popular anti-Russian jokes were the “Radio Erevan” jokes. Someone calls Radio Erevan, a representative of the Russian government, with a question and gets an answer from Radio Erevan.

Let me offer a Radio Erevan joke and show how my typology of the techniques of humor can be used.

Radio Erevan Joke: Comrade Gasparov

A listener calls Radio Erevan and asks, “Is it true that Comrade Gasparov won 10,000 rubles at the state lottery?”

“Yes, it is true,” replies Radio Erevan but it was not Comrade Gasparov but Academician Smirnow. And it was not 10,000 rubles but 5,000 rubles. And he didn’t win it at the lottery but lost it gambling.”

We find the following techniques at work in this text:

1. Technique 35: Reversal.

   The listener was told his question was correct. “Yes, it is true,” but everything that the listener asked about was wrong and reversed.

2. Technique 43: Stereotypes

   This joke relies upon stereotypes of Russians held by many people.

3. Technique 18: Exposure

   Radio Erevan (controlled by the Russians) is shown to be duplicitous, for after telling the listener that he or she was correct, Radio Erevan reverses everything.

One of the best Radio Erevan jokes, which I won’t analyze, involves the Sahara and the joys of Russian socialism.

A listener calls Radio Erevan and asks, “Can we bring socialism to the Sahara?”

“Yes,” replies Radio Erevan, “We can introduce socialism to the Sahara, but after the first five-year plan, the Sahara will have to import sand.”

13 Trump jokes

Now, let me analyze some Trump jokes.

14 Trump as comedic performance artist

An article by Kira Hall, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram, "The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle" (2016), offers an insight into one aspect of Trump’s rise – his value as a comedic performance artist.

The abstract to their article offers insights into this aspect of his popularity, and like many comedians, he is the master of insults (technique 25) but also mimicry (technique 28), exaggeration (technique 17), ridicule (technique 36) and other techniques. As the authors explain:

Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Post-structuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrue visual capital in a mediatized twenty-first-century politics that is celebrity driven. (Hall, Goldstein and Ingram 2016: 71)

Trump’s humorous techniques are listed: comedic gesture, caricature, exaggeration. Others have added vulgarity.

In a society of spectacle, the term the French Marxist Guy Debord uses to describe capitalist cultures, where celebrity is important and spectacle is dominant, Trump’s fame as an entertainer on “The Apprentice” and his aggressive and hostile humor must be recognized as playing an important role in his attaining the presidency.

His use of his hands, when he touches his thumb with his digital finger to make a circle – the A-OK sign – and his facial expressions and body language all call attention to the aggressive and hostile comedic element of his routine.

People come to his rallies because, among other things, they are entertaining. When the aggression becomes too dominant, however, and doesn’t disguise itself, it no longer is humor but becomes angry hostility – which is what we find in Trump’s brand of humor. People who attend his rallies can participate in his comedic and non-comedic aggression without any feelings of guilt, because much of the aggression is masked by comedy, and reinforce their political views at the same time.

We all take it for granted when comedians insult others. That is part of their acts. But when the president insults others the way Trump does, his comedy takes on a dark and unpleasant turn, reflecting, some would say, a deeply disturbed and troubled man.

An article, “Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump” by Donna M. Goldstein and Kira Hall (2017) adds more insights on Trump’s rise. They write:

[H]e defeated Republican competitors through derisive uses of humor, vulgarity, and gesture. His opponents could not compete with the comedic weapons of this powerful celebrity, precisely because his antics, while inappropriate for politicians, could readily be excused in Trump’s case as the stuff of entertainment. While studying this process up close across campaign speeches and diverse media, we slowly came to realize the power in Trump’s semiotic ambiguity, not just for his Republican opponents but also for the Democratic nominee that he would soon encounter. This same ambiguity enabled Trump to launch a sustained critique of “political correctness” that proved more compelling than anyone on the left might have realized at that time. Early in the Republican primaries, the notion that Trump’s campaign had no real content was regularly discussed in the news. Yet Trump’s style conveyed plenty to followers and critics alike. (Goldstein and Hall 2017: 398)

We find, then, that while there is a lot of humor about Trump, which focuses on his coarseness, his lack of taste, his ignorance, his nasty qualities, his lack of affect, his lack of empathy and other negative aspects of his personality and of his rhetoric, there is also a certain amount of humor – generally of a dark and extremely hostile nature – in his use of language, his body language and his behavior, in general. That humor, I suggest, has faded somewhat as Trump has succumbed to the darker forces in his personality.

If we see Trump as, to some degree, an entertainer and a political comedian, we can understand why he loves his rallies, for they are sites for him to perform his particular kind of political theater — a theater of what might be called fascistic comedic cruelty and overt hostility towards immigrants, racial minorities, Muslims (and some would say Jews) and people with liberal political views that resonates with those who attend his rallies/shows.

Trump, in a sense, is similar in nature (aside from his wealth) to the people in the crowds that come to his rallies. Seeing Trump as having comedic elements also explains why he has been so un-presidential and done so many things that presidents, to the point, have never done. And that is because humorists tend to be code-violators.

People in certain positions, such as professors and politicians, generally find that there are certain codes of conduct to which they are expected to conform. But comedians (and humorists in general) tend to be code violators, which enables them to see the world differently and which generally informs their humor.

With insult comedians, we know that their aggression is part of their acts. With victim comedians such as Rodney Dangerfield, we know that their insults to themselves (“I don’t get no respect”) is an act.

With Trump, it is a different story. His comedic aggression is not play but real, which leads me to suggest that calling Trump a comedian is not quite accurate. It is better to say that there are comedic aspects to his behavior and especially his performances at his rallies, but his humor is not an act and his comedic aggression is real and not play.

Trump remains a fascinating figure for the semiotician, but also for the psychoanalyst and scholars of many other disciplines. In this analysis, I have dealt with some of Trump’s most important signifiers in an attempt to better understand how Trump achieves his aims and how many non-Trump supporters feel about him.