Trump Lost Over $1 Billion in 10 Years: A Closer Look

-He used a fake name to call a reporter
and brag about how much his father loves him.
Man, I would say the dude needs to therapy,
but I don’t think he can afford it.
.. Maybe he can just use a fake name and be his own therapist.
“And how does that make you feel, Donald?”
“I feel smart, Dr. Barron.” [ Laughter ]
“You are smart, Donald. That’ll be $200.”
“Uh…” [ Laughter ]
“Can I owe you?”
.. Trump was never a successful businessman.

He just played one on TV.
Expecting Donald Trump to exhibit business acumen
is like expecting George Clooney to do an arterial bypass.
We already knew he was a con artist.
It’s also a story about the thing
Trump cynically claimed to fix,
the thing he actually benefited from his entire life,
the rigged system.
Most regular people are one layoff
or medical emergency away from a financial crisis,
but this guy lost a billion dollars over 10 years
and he ended up fine —
except for the fact that he went from looking
like the wolf of Wall Street
to a guy getting chased by a pack of wolves.

What Can Science Tell Us About Dad Jokes?

Humor that leads to groans and eye rolls may still help build stronger relationships between parents and children

.. Rather, he says, fathers want to connect in ways that can’t be misconstrued as sexual in nature or deemed aggressive. “Dad jokes tend to be calming, not angry, and are simple enough that anyone, even a little kid, can get them,” he says.

In an era when many U.S. parents are confused about how much to push their children, defaulting to a silly groaner like a dad joke can bring two generations a little closer while lightening the mood.

“You don’t want to tell dirty stories, and you want to be a good dad. And one way to be approachable and fun is to tell goofy puns or one-liners,” Dr. Pierce says. Even if the joke elicits an eye roll, “that’s all part of the game, the family inside joke,” he says.

Beyond making the audience cringe and, hopefully, bring a father a little closer to his son or daughter in a healthy manner, puns have given researchers insight into how the left side of the brain engages with the right side.

Researchers showed that the brain’s left hemisphere processes the language of the pun first, while the right side takes a few beats to catch the ambiguous dual meaning in a 2016 study published in the journal Laterality. The moments between provide for a super-awkward silence that can make a father giddy as he waits for his child to squirm and moan. If everyone laughs, then a connection has been made—and the father is reinforced to repeat these dad jokes again and again.

In This Prank Show, the Joke’s on Misogynistic Men

Last year, Sacha Baron Cohen used various disguises to pull off the most startling political humor of the Trump era on the Showtime series “Who Is America?”; and on Comedy Central’s “Nathan for You,” Nathan Fielder turned elaborate real-world stunts into unexpectedly emotional and intricate narratives. These artists expanded the ambition of the prank show while still clinging to its queasy-making juvenile roots.

The latest sneaky star of this new wave, the comedian Jena Friedman, introduces a gonzo feminist perspective in her Adult Swim show, “Soft Focus With Jena Friedman” that doesn’t just crack jokes about misogynist violence. It offers the giddy pleasure of payback.

Last year, Friedman, in character as an unflappable news reporter, did a biting segment on campus rape in which she persuaded three college frat brothers to drag around life-size female dolls called Cannot Consent Carrie. And in a bracing episode last month she built a more elaborate mousetrap involving sexual harassment in online gaming. The bit’s conceit was, If men knew what being victims of sexual harassment and abuse felt like, would that change anything?

Morally questionable humiliation has always been a part of the prank show, and the newer versions often make explicit a meanness that was always a part of “Candid Camera” and “Punk’d.” No one parodied this more brilliantly than Dave Chappelle when he imagined a show called “Zapped” in which, adults prank their kids by, for instance, having a doctor soberly tell them their parents are dead. Stop crying, toddlers, you’ve been zapped!

Prank comedy has been dominated by men tapping into their inner Jerky Boy, and Fielder and Cohen have been criticized for making women the butt of their jokes. Friedman not only flips this script, she also represents a departure for Adult Swim. In a 2016 investigation about gender disparity at the channel, Splitsider’s Megh Wright reported that it had never run a series solely created by a women. Responding to a thread on Reddit on the resulting controversy, Mike Lazzo, an executive at Adult Swim, wrote, “Women don’t tend to like conflict, comedy often comes from conflict, so that’s probably why we (or others) have so few female projects.”

Friedman makes a mockery of this sentiment. She has always gravitated toward conflict, whether arguing politics on Twitter or turning deadly serious subjects like Ebola and rape into stand-up fodder. Like Fielder, she maintains a flat equanimity, but also employs a slippery charm to ingratiate herself with subjects and her audience, sometimes glancing at the camera, Ferris Bueller-style, as if to say, “See what I just did?’

Al Franken’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ era was full of jokes disparaging women

On the sixth floor of 30 Rock, women have long been portrayed as sexual conquests, victims or aggressors, live on Saturday nights. During the 1990s in particular, SNL excelled at celebrating male libido and a get-away-with-anything approach to sex, while reducing women to their sexual function. The show consistently cheered male sexuality and reinforced its boundlessness (consent be damned), while shaming women who reached for power or were unlucky enough to be publicly associated with sex.

The SNL writers’ room is famously collaborative, so it’s hard to know how many such bits Franken specifically wrote. But as a writer on 285 episodes from 1976 to 2008, he undoubtedly influenced the zeitgeist of the show during that era.

 .. Chris Rock savages Hill for rejecting Thomas’s advances. Thomas “could have picked a much better-looking woman to blow his career on,” Rock explains. “He never touched her, and he’s going to lose the Supreme Court and didn’t even get to sleep with her, and that’s the real tragedy.”
.. Again, the laughs: Thomas’s sexual inadequacy is what’s supposed to be funny. SNL imagines that sexual harassment is hilarious and that unattractive women deserve it.
.. One 1996 skit about O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark portrays her as an erotomaniac or “fatal attraction type” — a derogation hurled at women during the 1990s, including at Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky, to discredit them and weaponize their sexuality. Clark, played by Nancy Walls, is less interested in the case’s outcome than forcing fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden to sleep with her, or “take the black bronco down the 405,” as the show put it. “The only thing I’m guilty of is being extremely horny,” Walls says. “Please remove your pants.”

.. Ferrell said in an interview that he wouldn’t have played Reno the way he did if she were a “normal woman.” In other words, because Reno didn’t always fit neatly into the stereotypical roles SNL ascribed to women — sexually aggressive like Clark or sexually victimized like Hill — the country’s chief law enforcement officer became a fake woman, just Ferrell in drag.
.. What’s clear, in truth, is that American comedy culture has used sexual abuse as fodder for too long.
.. From Franken and Harvey Weinstein to Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, women are reckoning with the painful reality that powerful men recently accused of sexual misconduct have long been the media and cultural gatekeepers in America.
They’ve been the arbiter and the lens, determining what is newsworthy, what is socially acceptable and, in Franken’s case, what is funny.
.. You can tell an awful lot about a society based on what it thinks is funny.