The often surreal presidency of Donald Trump supports the old saying that the problem with political jokes is they get elected.
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While political comedies can be tricky territory for Hollywood - why risk alienating or boring a large chunk of your audience? - there have still been quite a few. The latest is writer-director Jon Stewart's Irresistible, with Steve Carell as a Democrat operative who works to get a farmer elected mayor of a Midwest town.
Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is often cited as a classic piece of "Capra-corn", an idealistic Frank Capra-directed comedy about a common man struggling against the system. But like other such films there's a decidedly dark streak running through it. A naive young senator, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) is appointed to fill a vacancy with the thought that he will be easily manipulated by the men behind the party machine into doing what they want. But he turns out to be smarter and less corruptible than they hoped.
The political party he belongs to it is not named, presumably to avoid annoying either Democrats or Republicans. The broader point might be that both sides have their corrupt and undesirable elements.
Interestingly, Capra was a conservative Republican - one of his friends, screenwriter John Lee Mahin, said he adored Mussolini and had a large picture of of the Italian dictator prominently displayed. His films, though, were populist, often displaying sympathy and affection for ordinary people as well as a belief in the power of individuals to make a difference for good. You could make an argument that this swings either left or right, or possibly both: Forrest Gump has also been claimed by, or blamed on, both sides of politics.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) holds up startlingly well as both thriller and dark comedy and its title has entered the language. A central idea of the film is that a right-wing Republican demagogue could be under the control of Chinese communists. While its story involving brainwashing and sleeper agents might seem farfetched, the idea of foreign influence over elections and candidates is not.
Another darkly funny and somewhat prescient satire is A Face in the Crowd (1957). Andy Griffiths plays a folksy drifter of a musician who is recruited by a producer to host a radio show as "Lonesome" Rhodes. He becomes popular enough to have his own TV show and whose popularity and political clout rise alongside his ego.
Given the influence of shock jocks in both the US and Australia and the way media can help create powerful stars (including Donald Trump) it doesn't feel as dated as it should. The mechanism for Rhodes' apparently downfall might seem a little antiquated though. Trump once said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters" and Rhodes does nothing as serious as that.
Might Trump be correct? We've already seen a shift in American puritanism. Gary Hart - played by Hugh Jackman in the docudrama The Front Runner - withdrew from pursuing the Democrats presidential nomination in 1988 after persistent media reports of marital infidelity. Bill Clinton's presidency was rocked by multiple allegations of affairs and he was impeached on perjury charges after lying about his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. He was acquitted and it later came out that at least several Republicans who had sought Clinton's scalp had also had affairs, including Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Clinton was the model for John Travolta's character, a charismatic, womanising governor with an eye on the presidency, in the film Primary Colors (1998). By 2016, Americans' tolerance - or moral degeneracy, depending on your point of view - was shown to have grown: Trump gained the Republican nomination despite allegations of affairs with multiple women during all three of his marriages.
Still, they would only put up with so much. Democratic congressman Anthony Wiener resigned from office in 2011 over a sexually suggestive photo he sent to a woman on Twitter. He didn't learn his lesson: over the next few years multiple sexting incidents came to light - for some he used the pseudonym Carlos Danger. During his run for mayor of New York City he allowed documentarians an incredible amount of access. They detailed the collapse of his campaign and marriage in the documentary Wiener. Eventually he went to jail after sexting a 15-year-old girl.
However, if you're powerful enough, you can try to distract the public from a sex scandal by fabricating a war, at least in fiction. Wag the Dog (1997) employed this idea, with a Hollywood producer enlisted by the top presidential spin doctor to create the appearance of a conflict in Albania, a ruse that grows more and more complicated and dark.
Darkness was also at the heart of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) in which the US president (Peter Sellers) is facing the possibility of nuclear holocaust. The most sensible characters in this black comedy are the most ineffectual.
More positive - almost Capra-cornian - was the depiction of the title character in The American President (1995), an Aaron Sorkin rom-com that was in many ways a test run for his later TV series The West Wing. Here, the widowed president (Michael Douglas) is juggling personal and professional complications with legislation, running for re-election, and pursuing a relationship with an environmental lobbyist (Annette Bening).
It will be interesting to see what kind of comedy the Trump legacy brings in the future, although this president seems almost beyond satire.