Ask A Genius 1496: Rick Rosner on Trump, Polarized Comedy, and the Golden Age of TV
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/20
Rick Rosner reflects on how Donald Trump reshaped American comedy, exhausting writers with endless scandals while deepening cultural divides. Unlike past celebrity meltdowns, Trump’s daily chaos fueled constant material but eroded shared humor, splitting audiences along political lines. Biden, by contrast, proved difficult to parody due to his low visibility. Rosner compares Trump to Hitler in comedy’s limits, yet notes historical satire thrived abroad. He critiques sitcom polarization—urban-liberal versus rural-traditional—and praises joke-dense shows like 30 Rock. Finally, he analyzes Netflix’s failed “moat” strategy, where overspending produced a golden age of streaming content without creating lasting competitive dominance.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would you want to ask about it?
Rick Rosner: Here is something worth discussing: American comedy—like so many American things—has been reshaped by Trump. He divided the country so deeply that we no longer laugh at the same things. MAGA audiences will not even watch the same entertainment as everyone else. It is a problem when you have to cover the same subject night after night, year after year.
It was rough enough when Michael Jackson’s legal troubles dragged on for months—creepy, unsettling material that could only be joked about so much. It was rough when Britney Spears spiraled from entertainingly out of control to seriously out of control—shaving her head, being placed in a conservatorship. The same with Lindsay Lohan. And with Amanda Bynes, I am not even sure it was ever funny—her collapse from working comedian to full-blown crisis was too fast, too tragic.
But Trump? He is the worst of all. Because he spews out new, ridiculous nonsense every single day—and has been doing it for years.
He first appeared on the political scene in a serious way in 2015. Now it is ten years later. And the jokes have been exhausted—except he keeps doing new things, so comedians can come up with new jokes. But it has a depressing sameness. Conservatives ask, “Why do you always pick on Trump?”
The answer is because Trump does more horrible, absurd, and outrageous things than anybody else. Biden, by contrast, was tough to joke about because he kept out of sight. His team shielded him, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Biden should have been in front of Americans far more often. He should have owned up to the fact that he is old, that he makes verbal stumbles, but that he is still sharp on the issues. Instead, the White House lived in fear of another gaffe making the Fox News highlight reel.
I believe Biden, for the most part, had his act together. But he moved slowly and he sounded hesitant. If he had leveled with Americans, he might have lost some support, but not as much as he ultimately did. By hiding out, he made it very hard for comedians to make jokes about him, because there was so little to work with.
Meanwhile, it is not unfair to joke about Trump, because Trump constantly does corrupt and ridiculous things. But it is terrible for comedy. Hitler was even worse for comedy. In Nazi Germany, you could be killed for making fun of him.
And yet, there was some great comedy made about Hitler. The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin—though I have never seen it—is a classic. It came out before Hitler began slaughtering tens of millions. To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny as a Polish actor involved with the resistance, is another classic from that time. But inside Germany, of course, no comedy about Hitler was possible.
In some ways, Trump is our Hitler. JD Vance once famously said that Trump was America’s Hitler. Many people have said the same, though Vance later changed his mind. The funny thing is, Trump does not care if you trashed him in the past—as long as you kiss his ass in the present.
Jacobsen: So outside of Trump, what about comedy in general?
Rosner: I have not thought much about comedy beyond Trump, except that we are very divided. Leanne Morgan just got her first sitcom on Netflix. She has been a stand-up comic for twenty or thirty years, very funny, with a style that appeals to both liberals and conservatives. The sitcom is produced by Chuck Lorre, who has been making hit comedies for over thirty years.
But the show itself was way too much of a traditional sitcom. My wife and I gave it about five minutes, and it felt too corny. Maybe they targeted it too much at rural audiences—I do not know.
We should probably come back to this after I’ve thought about it for a while. Like, 30 Rock is one of the funniest sitcoms of the past fifteen years. But it is definitely targeted at urban, big-city audiences—liberal-leaning folk.
And it is not funny because you are liberal. It is funny because they try to pack in three jokes a minute. The same team—Robert Carlock and Tina Fey—also did Girls5eva, which is another show where they try to cram in a hundred jokes into a half-hour episode. But a lot of those jokes rely on having a mainstream, liberal knowledge base, and maybe liberal attitudes.
Jacobsen: Do we have sitcoms that hit everybody, like Cheers, The Bob Newhart Show, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show?
Rosner: I do not know. Saturday Night Live does not work for conservatives. Every once in a while, they’ll have a conservative-leaning host like Shane Gillis, and his episode was funny. I think he got fired from SNL as a writer in 2019 for some offensive comments that resurfaced, but his stand-up is strong, and he has since built a big following.
But, anyway, we are all polarized in America, and it is bad for entertainment. And yet, paradoxically, we are also in a golden age of television. There are so many good shows.
Though maybe there were more five years ago, when the streaming services—Netflix in particular—were spending billions to establish an impregnable moat.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by “moat”?
Rosner: In business, a moat is when you get so far out in front of competitors that they cannot catch up. Google did this with search. They outperformed Ask Jeeves, Bing, and everyone else so decisively that “Google” became synonymous with Internet search. Even though Google’s search has declined in quality—been “shitified,” you might say—AI has partly “un-shitified” it. But Google still has that moat.
Netflix tried to do the same during COVID. They spent billions producing content, hoping to build an insurmountable advantage over other streaming services. The others—Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime—tried as well. Nobody succeeded. But during that race, we got a massive number of new shows, many of them pretty good. The strategy was: spend billions now, lock in viewers, build the moat, and then coast.
But in the end, no one gained an unbeatable edge. The companies pulled back. And now production is way down.
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