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The special election issue of the New York Review of Books has landed in my mailbox, and it promises hours and hours of hilarious reading.
Let’s start with the high comedy of Susan Faludi (who I didn’t know was still a thing, or even alive), with a piece about “the joyful Kamala Harris and the mirthless Donald Trump.” Here’s my favorite part:
[Harris’s] high-wattage beams and peals of laughter, her sartorial mash-ups of Chuck Taylors and pearls, and her campaign’s convention theme of “joy” all telegraph a happy-warrior candidacy. “I have my mother’s laugh,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. “I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed!” And she has no plans to tone it down. “You know, I’m never going to be…” she said…and then laughed. “That’s just, I’m not that person.”
Laughter is not part of Donald Trump’s demeanor. Maybe he’s not good at it. The comedian-magician Penn Jillette, who was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice, which Trump hosted, said the former president was “someone who has never laughed sincerely and never made a joke.” Trump would laugh “in a bully way,” Jillette said. “‘Ha-ha, you look kinda fat, Joe!’ He’ll do that. But he won’t laugh at himself.”
Faludi seems to be the only person who hasn’t noticed that Kamala is the only person laughing at Kamala’s appearances. Maybe she’s inadvertently on to something with this sequel:
No wonder her happiness makes him unhappy. “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” Trump said. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy.” As with all of Trump’s riffs, he’s got this one on auto-replay. “Have you heard her laugh? That is the laugh of a crazy person. That is the laugh of a crazy—the laugh of a lunatic.”