Who Are They Kidding?
What The Science of Humor Can Tell Us About Why Trump and his Allies are Doubling Down on Sexist “Jokes”
Donald Trump's campaign is facing backlash from a racist "joke" that comedian Tony Hinchcliffe told at a campaign rally this past weekend. And yet, the backlash hasn’t kept the campaign or its allies from defending that kind of “humor” or from continuing to pump out not only racist but also sexist and misogynistic "jokes."
Earlier this week, for example, Trump's Director of White House personnel John McEntee tweeted "Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go." The tweet is referring to the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in 1920, and it included a video of McEntee in a restaurant, grinning as he scooped up a forkful of pasta and said to the camera: "So, I guess they misunderstood. When we said we want mail-only voting, we meant male M-A-L-E." After being called out by Harris’s official rapid response team on Twitter/X, McEntee then responded with yet another tweet, telling them: “Relax, relax it’s only jokes.”
A day later, Elon Musk's America PAC released what has been dubbed “the most misogynistic ad in the history of politics.” It opens provocatively with the assertion that "Kamala Harris is a C Word. You heard that right. A big ole C Word," then quickly pivots to show that the “joke” is on the viewer, because the C here stands for communist, even if a different C word is what viewers might have assumed they implied.
Setting aside obvious concerns about the invocation of McCarthy-era rhetoric, these messages raise questions about why Trump and his allies are couching their sexism and misogyny in crude attempts at jokes.
What the science suggests on that front is that they're likely leaning into so-called humor because exposure to sexist “jokes” can take men—or even teenage boys—from sexism-curious to sexism-confident, thereby priming them to get on board with gutting US women’s rights, as outlined in Project 2025.
Take, for example, experiments conducted by psychologist Thomas Ford and his colleagues, who showed their participants sexist messages, presented in either “joke” or non-joke form. They found that, compared to participants who saw the non-joke messages, those exposed to the “joke” versions subsequently reported more skepticism of women’s rights, greater tolerance of sexist interactions, and greater confidence that others would tolerate those interactions, as well. Ford and his colleagues also found that the effect of sexist jokes was particularly strong for participants who already harbored some sexist views.
Why? Because even sexist men don’t want to think of themselves as “bad guys,” and humor offers them a way to manage the incongruity between their sexist thoughts, words, and actions and the more gallant way they want to perceive themselves. Take, for example, a dad I’ll call Dennis, who I interviewed as part of the research for my new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Dennis, a political Independent and a daily reader of the New York Times, works full-time in a job in IT, while his wife Bethany, a former social worker, stays home with their kids. On the one hand, Dennis acknowledged what he called the “perk” of having a homemaker wife, by which he meant that Bethany would manage all the housework and childcare responsibilities. “It’s just easier if she takes care of all that,” he told me, since devolving all that responsibility means he can focus on getting ahead at the office and reserve his time off for “more fun things” than taking the kids to the doctor or doing chores at home. On the other hand, Dennis didn’t want to think of himself as exploiting or oppressing Bethany, and that’s where humor came in. Reflecting on their division of labor, he told me, “It’s funny, because we’re not your typical [nineteen] fifties family where we have to fit these roles.” Essentially, their family arrangement was “funny” to Dennis, because their traditional reality didn’t fit the more progressive way he wanted to perceive himself.
And that’s how humor operates. What we find funny is often a function of the contradictions we perceive. If, for example, we think of Donald Trump as a fundamentally “good guy,” then we’ll probably laugh when he “jokes” about grabbing women by their genitals, because it doesn’t fit the “good guy” image we have of him in our heads. If, instead, we think of Donald Trump as a misogynist, then there’s no contradiction between what he says about women and how we see him, so there’s a good chance we won’t laugh at his “joke,” and so we might be skeptical that he’s actually joking at all.
Attention to the role of contradiction in humor can also help us make sense of sexist humor’s appeal. Men and boys will likely be attracted to sexist humor when they see society as more equal gender-wise than it actually is, or when they perceive society's power dynamics as favoring women over men. And it's somewhat understandable why men and boys might make these assumptions, because women in the US have made big strides. Girls for example, now have higher GPAs than boys do, at least on average, and they're more likely than boys to go to college.
What these assumptions ignore, however, is that women's educational achievements haven't translated into equal power in the workforce or equal support with responsibilities at home. Bethany, for example, was making only about $30,000 a year as a social worker, while Dennis was making $90,000 a year in his job, despite her having a Masters to his Bachelors degree. The fact that Bethany was, in Dennis's words, "making dirt" as a social worker was also big factor in their decision to have Bethany leave the workforce, since, in Dennis’s view, it didn’t make sense to “spend half of her paycheck finding care.”
And it's not just Bethany. Women in the US still do roughly twice as much unpaid caregiving labor as men do, even though women's workforce participation rates are catching up with men's. Women are also paid less on average than men are, even when they have similar levels of education, and particularly when they have young children at home. These patterns, meanwhile, aren’t a function of women’s innate preferences but rather reflect the devaluation of feminized labor and the gendered hostility that women often face at work. Sociologist Natasha Quadlin, for example, found in an experimental audit study that prospective employers prefer men who get Cs in college over women who get As in the same college majors, because they see the former as more "likeable" and the latter as too "uptight."
Unfortunately, that perception of women as too “uptight” also works makes it easy for men to silence women who complain about their so-called “jokes.” Psychologist Robyn Mallett and her colleagues, for example, found in their experiments that when men tell sexist jokes, it makes women just as uncomfortable as when men express those same views in non-joke form, but hearing the joke version makes women less inclined to report the offending man to authorities, because they worry that, rather than the man facing consequences for his actions, they’ll get called out for not being able to take a joke.
That’s exactly what McEntee did on Twitter, with his insistence that Harris’s team just “relax.” And that’s also what Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance did this week by saying that Americans “have to stop getting so offended,” and that anyone who is upset about the “jokes” Trump’s allies are telling should just “take a chill pill” rather than complain.
Maybe if Harris wins, the joke will be on them.
For more on these topics, check out my new book, Holding It Together, which traces present-day policies back to their roots, revealing a systematic agreement to DIY society and persuade Americans to accept precarity while women bear the brunt. Drawing on five years of research, including more than 400 hours of interviews and surveys with more than 4000 families across the socioeconomic, racial, and political spectrum, I show how women's labor allows the US to get by without the social safety nets that our peer nations take for granted. And I debunk the myths intended to delude us into believing we can get by without a net and to divide us by race, class, gender, religion, and politics in ways that prevent us from coming together to demand the kind of net that would provide security, dignity, and care for all.
If you’ve already read the book, first, THANK YOU! And second, I’d be deeply honored if you’d share a review on Amazon or Good Reads. Reader reviews are one of the most effective tools for spreading the word. And even a quick “this was great!” goes a very long way. Also, I have some more book-themed stickers available, so if you’d like one (or a few to share with friends), drop me an email!
