Portraits of The Orange Man

Portraits of The Orange Man

Lynn Charara

Throughout his presidential campaign and into his presidency, Donald J. Trump has become particularly well known for his unusual political presentation, including his unconventional talking style. The way he talks does not conform to the mainstream American metalinguistic beliefs of what a presidential candidate or president should sound like: articulate, consistent, collected, and professional. Satirists and parodists have capitalized on Trump’s talking features in their impersonations and commentaries on him. This paper analyzes the role of satirists and parodists in maintaining the metalinguistic beliefs of what a president should sound like. The primary sources of this research are select episodes of Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The significance of the jokes made about Trump’s talking style in these shows is drawn from the work of anthropologists and linguists including Basso, Mintz, McWhorter, and Lempert and Silverstein. Through the critical analysis of how comedians mock Trump’s talking style, this paper demonstrates how they participate in upholding presidential speech standards by mocking of Trump’s failure to live up to these expectations. By placing comedians’ representation of Trump into the theoretical framework of the linguistic significance of humor and satire, this paper shows that comedians ridicule of a politician’s speech plays a role in discrediting said politician. Not only do comedians including Alec Baldwin, Trevor Noah, and Stephen Colbert make people laugh at Trump, they also critique his failure to live up to presidential speaking standards, thus attempting to subvert his political power. Future research on this topic be directed towards analyzing whether presidential speech standards change after Trump’s success in the 2016 elections.