On Cat Memes, Cannibalism, and Election Lead-Up Laughter

Maggie Hennefeld writes on the powers and perils of satirical laughter in the run-up to the 2024 US elections.

By Maggie HennefeldOctober 20, 2024

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

• Film

• Television

YOU CAN PREDICT the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election by tracking the laughter in the room. Laughter glides on the edge of the unspeakable. It flirts with taboo obscenity and unbearable trauma while toeing the line and somehow lightening the tone. When Donald Trump absurdly accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of eating people’s pets, silly videos of armed feline militias vied for viral visibility with TikTok loops of dogs and cats reacting to debate footage off-screen. Meanwhile, the endlessly memeable specter of ALF—everyone’s favorite cat-eating TV sitcom alien from the planet Melmac—evoked the mock cannibalism of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729), a Juvenalian pamphlet that offered to solve the Irish overpopulation and starvation crisis by serving up newborn infants “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”

Like Swift’s furious satire, the viral meme culture of the 2024 election showdown between fragile democracy and resurgent fascism is responding to the apocalyptic political conjuncture with grotesque absurdity. As reality unravels, the jokes will only get weirder.

Intergenerational cannibalism has become more than a metaphor: the rich eating the poor’s offspring, Protestants gobbling up the papacy, Satanists pan-frying Christian progeny, outlandish conspiracy theories that human remains were found in Oprah Winfrey’s L.A. home. Coralie Fargeat’s new body-horror satire film The Substance puts its finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in its lurid cautionary tale of two women who threaten to destroy each other over their shared biological destiny of spontaneous de-aging. A 21st-century All About Eve (1950) with an appetite for bone-cracking flesh, The Substance’s extremity speaks vividly to generational antagonisms that transcend left versus right (let alone Democrat versus Republican) as they converge on nothing less than the fate of humanity.

The story of a 50-year-old fitness guru (Demi Moore) who spawns a younger, “more perfect” doppelgänger (Margaret Qualley) out of a slit in her back offers a spine-tingling allegory for our cataclysmic, click-thirsty times. Though not exactly a knee-slapper, The Substance satirizes the slow-burn horrors of our collective gusto for perpetual novelty over the less glamorous business of species survival, noncompliance with genocide, and protecting the future of the planet.

The political humor of the 2024 elections appeals to our pervasive feelings of historical doom, particularly around the impossibility of immediate revolutionary social change. Is the popular vanguard just a decoy from the old regime’s death grip? A recent cartoon by Adam Zyglis depicts the “Kamala Coalition” as a union of Gen-Z “Swifties” and Bush-era neocons, juxtaposing Taylor Swift holding up a protest sign reading “The Tortured Poets Dept. for Harris” next to Dick Cheney’s ominous admission of “The Torture Dept. for Harris.” The temporary misalignment of opposites—spliced together by an inappropriate pun—is one of the oldest jokes in the book. As late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon put it, “You know these are strange times when Dick Cheney and Barbra Streisand are voting for the same person.”

Generational commitment against historical erasure is the optimistic subtext for Harris’s most viral campaign line: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?!” Laughing and quoting her late mother Shyamala Gopalan at a 2023 ceremony for educational equity, Harris continued, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The coconut tree has of course become an indelible icon of Harris’s blazing ascent to the candidacy in late July (maybe rivaled only by Charli XCX’s “kamala is brat”). Coconut memes echo the Harris campaign’s anti-MAGA rallying cry of “We’re not going back!” while sidestepping the elephant in the room of what exactly it would mean to move forward.

Though not known for his upbeat sense of humor, Karl Marx had a very different understanding of materialist stasis and the inescapable predominance of political farce. To Swifties from Swiftboating—let alone to zoomorphic cannibal memes from Jonathan Swift—has the flavor of Marx’s well-worn critique of farcical recurrence in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), which opens with his famous addendum to Hegel: history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But there is nothing funny about farce in Marx’s account, a genre that arises from the horrible sensation of being haunted by “dead generations” who weigh “like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” This is precisely why the revolutionary class—the Prussian proletariat then, pro-Palestine student uprisers now—can only make their own history “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Loosely paraphrased, when the old guard loses its popular legitimacy but maintains its death grip on hegemonic power, it inevitably lapses into sickening farce. Cat memes are cold comfort as “dead generations” would rather throw out the mother than risk spilling the baby’s bathwater.

For Harris, whose coconut tree metaphor went viral (again) on social media in the exuberant hours after Joe Biden suspended his gaffe-laden candidacy, generational inheritance means honoring a biographical debt: we owe something to our family and to the people who came before us. Their unfinished lives and unfulfilled hopes inextricably entangle the prospects of our own. But the personal does not map neatly onto the political. The existential urgency of confronting climate denialism and its foothold in unfettered corporate capitalism will demand a deep reckoning with the idioms and ideologies of the past, nicely captured by a silly Onion headline: “Baby Boomers Leave Entire $78.55 Trillion Fortune to Single Spoiled Pomeranian.” If not the earth, it is the pets who shall inherit the surplus value.

Comedy provides an irresistible filter for witnessing the unwatchable and giving shape to the utter senselessness of gruesome, spectacle-based reality. We turn to ludicrous gags and anthropomorphic cat memes in the throes of violent upheaval and historical impasse. Who can forget Tom Hooper’s pornographic CGI reboot of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running Broadway musical Cats? Released on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resounding belly flop of Cats became an emblem for the pervasive feeling of being trapped between incommensurable worlds: the revolutionary desire for immediate structural change and immovable continuation of all the old, destructive powers. Universally panned as “unfilmable,” a “tragical mess,” and “the worst movie ever made,” Cats featured an uncanny wallpaper of mega-celebrities bedecked in digital fur and wagging their VFX tails, which ran roughshod over what Lauren Berlant theorized as “the historical sensorium” in their book on Cruel Optimism (2011). Gluttons for the taste of catnip, we gleefully took the bait.

The writer Kate Aronoff offered a Gramscian reading of the movie on Twitter, pairing a still—Taylor Swift, flaunting a jewel-encrusted bottled labeled “Catnip”—with the caption “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Cats predominated as a morbid symptom for the unrepresentable crises of 2019 and their aftermath. Five years later, we sure have come a long way. Instead of Jellicle matriarchs preening in digital orange fur that Dame Judi Dench once compared to “five foxes fucking on [her] back,” Ohio house cats are being recruited by fake websites to enlist in a rogue militia, issuing a simulacral counterattack against the unaccountable spread of xenophobic, racist conspiracy theories.

The thing about “morbid symptoms” is that their absurd facade belies the horrors of real world violence. Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, now face routine death threats due to Trump and J. D. Vance’s false accusations while daily bomb sweeps have been mandated in public schools across the state. There is nothing funny about these fatal consequences.

Humor often traffics in the taboo, daring to go where it shouldn’t. When there’s a mass shooting in the United States (of which there have been over 400 so far this year), The Onion often reprints the same headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” It is tempting to overestimate the social consequence of satirical jokes—even morbid, furious, and weaponized political jokes—because they make us feel a little better and briefly lighten our load. In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020), a macabre mockumentary filmed in the run-up to the 2020 elections, Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) takes his daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) to a crisis pregnancy center after she accidentally swallows a plastic baby figurine behind the back alleyway of a Christian bakery. Borat’s repeated declaration that he “put the baby in her” exposes an anti-abortionist Evangelical pastor’s conspiracy to excuse a seeming confession of rape and incest. The pastor misunderstands Borat, but there’s no misunderstanding his response.

I laughed my head off at the gag’s brazen obscenity and on-the-nose topicality. Two years later, the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to overturn the precedent and protections of Roe v. Wade (1973). And somehow, the first thing I thought of upon hearing this devastating news of Dobbs v. Jackson was the crisis pregnancy prank in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Comedy squares the circle of creative rebellion and toothless disavowal—a shot of pleasure to chase otherwise indigestible news (mixing metaphors of “the substance” and Borat’s bakery antics). Wrong laughter “hammer[s] into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society,” to dredge up Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno’s bitter analysis of the long-suffering but unflappable Donald Duck. As they put it, cartoon ducks “get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.” (For a surreal treatment, see Daffy Duck in 1953’s Duck Amuck.) Whether that humorous twist represents an act of imaginative transgression or one of passive submission (“I know, but all the same”: the mantra of disavowal) remains an open question days away from the 2024 elections.

We need to know why we are laughing because everything is at stake! Project 2025 would, among other authoritarian policy initiatives, dismantle the Department of Education, further criminalize abortion and defund access to reproductive healthcare, gut federal labor protections, deny transgender personhood, and radically expand the executive powers of the presidency. A second term of Trump would make the early snafus of Sean Spicer’s “Holocaust centers,” Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” and Rudy Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco feel like teleporting into a quaint time capsule.

What is the power of laughter to effect social change and give voice to the unspeakable? After the Democratic National Committee held its “historically diverse” convention in August while banning all Palestinian speakers, Jon Stewart (who returned to host The Daily Show once a week) skewered the hypocrisy in a widely viewed segment that contrasted the Harris campaign’s rallying cry of “joy” and “happiness” with its complicity in funding and forgetting the genocide in Gaza. What Stewart was saying is nothing new. Student-led uprisings on college campuses around the world have condemned US backing for the occupation and demanded institutional divestment from Israeli companies and weapons manufacturers that arm the genocide, which has killed over 43,000 Palestinians to date while targeting hospitals, schools, civilians, children, and journalists. “Israel Accuses Al Jazeera of Being Mouthpiece for Journalism,” joked The Onion in May and again in September as Israel shut down Al Jazeera’s Ramallah bureau amid the exploding device massacres in Lebanon, senselessly escalated by relentless airstrikes and rapidly mushrooming into all-out regional war.

Satire is meant to hold up a mirror to the place of the laughing spectator, who compulsively wants to have it both ways. We walk a razor-thin edge between protest and disavowal—or coping and cowardice—in turning to humor as a vehicle for voicing dissent against unimaginable atrocities and obscene abuses of power.

When Stewart hosted The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015, satire felt immediately consequential as a response to the catastrophic juggernaut of the Iraq War and freewheeling rise of far-right conspiracy theorists at Fox News. “[B]lending the mimetic and the real,” observes Amber Day in her book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate (2011), the parodic news show “enables and articulates a critique of the inadequacies of contemporary political discourse, while demonstrating an engaged commitment to the possibility of a more honest public debate.” Whether that also applied to the years that sowed the seeds of neocolonial domination and runaway social inequality—paving the way to Trumpism, Brexit, and autocracy across the globe—remains up for grabs.

Less controversial is the truism that satire had been crudely defanged by 2016. By the rise of Trump, as Emily Nussbaum wryly observes in “How Jokes Won the Election,” “the wheel had spun hard the other way: now it was the neo-fascist strongman who held the microphone and an army of anonymous dirty-joke dispensers who helped put him in office.” No longer “the rebel’s stance,” comedic taboo became the property of xenophobic conspiracy-peddlers and misogynist clickbaiters in its immediate collective sway and irreversible electoral consequences.

The tone has since tightened like a noose around the necks of even gallows humorists, preempting anything like Freud’s escapist joke in his little essay “Humour” (1927), where a prisoner about to be executed on a Monday says: “Well, the week’s beginning nicely.” There are no more Mondays when the Doomsday Clock hovers at 90 seconds to midnight. After Biden stepped aside on July 21, I was one among many who felt a strange surge of playful hope. The inevitability of another Trump term had been briefly averted with a sneaky substitution trick of competent Black woman for rambling octogenarian.

Despite the “childless cat lady” antics and Tim Walz’s heartwarming dad jokes, much of that initial optimism has significantly cooled (at least, for many of us). But the desperate will to avert full-scale fascism continues to hold strong. Criminalization of free speech, violent social oppression, and impunity for genocide are somehow now the table stakes.

As the satirists remind us, things can always get worse.

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Featured image: Still from “Live and Let Die,” ALF, 1989. Apple TV+.