You all remember comedy? That thing from the 1980s where you hate your wife? Well, it’s back! We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!

Remember, censorship is when people don’t laugh at your jokes. Freedom is when your late-night show gets permanently taken off the air for financial reasons (16 million of them) and the president expresses his approval. Comedy is great again, which is to say, it’s funny only if the president says so. Jokes are back, baby! Airplane travel is the worst! Take my wife, please. She’s a green-card holder who’s been in the country for 25 years! Knock, knock! Who’s there? Sorry, they won’t identify themselves, but they say they’re here about the op-ed.

The Norwegian tourist who was denied entry by border officers—after the agents took a special interest in the meme of J. D. Vance he had on his phone—didn’t understand that when we say that comedy is legal again, we mean real comedy. This was clearly not comedy. This was somebody laughing at J. D. Vance. Comedy is when you laugh with J. D. Vance about people who don’t look to him like their ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Comedy is the memes that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House keep sharing about how Donald Trump is Superman and “my body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations” and “even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME”!

If you need any more clarity about what comedy is, here’s one of Trump’s favorite comedians (“I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined.”) offering what has been identified as a joke: “You know what?” Gutfeld said on Fox News. “I’ve said this before: We need to learn from the Blacks, the way they were able to remove the power from the N-word by using it. So from now on, it’s ‘What up, my Nazi?’ ‘Hey, what up, my Nazi?’ Hey, what’s hanging, my Nazi?’”

Laugh? I thought I’d die! This joke is funny, because people are constantly saying that Gutfeld is a Nazi, and he is getting a little sick of it. So, to dodge the Nazi allegations, he’s riffing on the N-word! This is comedy now!

Comedy is legal again. You are free to say whatever you want, provided it’s a slur. You must say it, or President Trump won’t approve your new stadium! No, that’s not a joke. That’s completely serious.

You should know by now: Everything is serious, until it’s suddenly a joke and you were a fool for not laughing. Everything is a joke, until suddenly it’s serious and how dare you laugh. Everyone is trolling, until they aren’t, and even when they aren’t, they are. Everyone is always and never joking. It’s not a threat. It’s a joke. Comedy is legal again!

Tragedy, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. More and more people are getting pushed into open sewers lately. Boom times for comedy. Boom times for laughing at. From the open sewer, you can hear a lot of laughing.

They are so glad not to have to remember anymore that other people are in the room. What an enormous relief! Finally, they can say it! That is the project of Trumpism: becoming the only people in the room again. Becoming both the protagonists and the intended audience, the only people whose laughter counts.

What you think is funny depends on what you believe to be true. When you make a joke, you are asking someone to look at something and see the same thing you see. When the response is laughter, it is a way of making eye contact, of looking through the world at one another. That is the terror of bombing onstage: the realization that what you are seeing is not what everyone else is seeing. The anxiety that you have got the world by the wrong end, that you are alone in what you think.

But there are two reasons you can laugh. One is recognition, and the other is coercion. Some jokes are funny only with a power differential to back them up. This is the kind of comedy that’s legal now: the joke whose punch line you’re afraid to be. The kind of joke you have to take. Laugh, so they’ll know you’re one of them. Laugh, or he’ll kill you. Laugh, and maybe you won’t be next.

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