This is a tale of short fingers and long memories, low insults and the highest office in the world. It's also a story about how humour is useful in popping even the biggest balloons filled with the hottest air.
In the late 1980s, the satirical New York magazine Spy – perhaps the greatest periodical in the history of the universe – took as its main target a local blowhard real estate developer, Donald Trump. It began referring to him as "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump" (to be fair, it also referred to CBS's Laurence Tisch as "churlish dwarf billionaire" and Sylvester Stallone as "Play-doh-faced homunculus-action toy"). In 1989, Spy gave Mr. Trump five spots on its annual list of 100 Most Annoying People, Places and Things.
You'd think Mr. Trump might have moved on in the past 30 years. I mean, that's a lot of gilt under the bridge. And really, he will soon ascend to the White House, thanks to a couple of cloaks placed over mud puddles by his gallant friends in the Kremlin. If ever there is a perch to be magnanimous from, it's that one. But magnanimity does not seem to be part of Mr. Trump's cosmos.
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Mr. Trump has not been able to let it go. The derision of his digits makes him crazy. At one of the Republican presidential nominee debates, gently goaded by Marco Rubio, he burst into a furious defence of his hands – and by extension, the unseen part of his anatomy (no, not his heart. He couldn't very well defend the size of that).
Over the years, Mr. Trump has written to Graydon Carter, then editor of Spy, now the editor of Vanity Fair, arguing that his hands are of regulation size. According to Mr. Carter, he has even sent pictures of himself, his fingers circled in bright gold ink. Not that this is alarming behaviour in a future president, of course.
Which brings us to this week. Mr. Trump picked up his favourite bullhorn, Twitter, to denounce Mr. Carter and Vanity Fair: "Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!" What apparently distracted the president-elect from worries about Syria, China and the distressing conflict represented by his business interests, was Vanity Fair's hilarious review of the restaurant in Trump Tower.
"Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America" read the headline on Tina Nguyen's review, in which she revealed she'd eaten a roasted pig's eyeball that was tastier than the restaurant's Gold Label Burger. A normal president-elect – say, one who had already divested from his real state empire so that his constituents knew he had their best interests and not his bank balance at heart – would have laughed it off. But authoritarian-type politicians do not like laughing – and they certainly do not like being laughed at.
Which is why laughing at them is more important than ever, even it does present its own dangers. Saturday Night Live, for example, has gained new strength from Alec Baldwin's portrayal of Trump as both thick-headed and thin-skinned. "Unwatchable!" tweeted the Critic-in-Chief. "Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can't get any worse. Sad." Fortunately, there's a gang armed with glowing pokers, ready for the next four years, including John Oliver, Trevor Noah and chiefly Samantha Bee. Oddly, they're all immigrants to America. That might prove useful: They can flee out the back when there's a knock on the front door.
That's the hard lesson around the rest of the world for satirists and comedians who want to take potshots at autocrats. Consider that Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to have a German comedian criminally prosecuted for reading a rude poem about him on German TV. Or that a group of teenaged Egyptian satirists called Street Children went to jail for months for making videos that mocked the government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Or that members of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot were jailed for "hooliganism" in Vladimir Putin's Russia (they have returned, undeterred, with an anti-Trump song called Make America Great Again.)
Things are safer in the United States – or at least they are until they're not. When Charlie Chaplin set out to satirize the rise of Nazism with his film The Great Dictator, Hollywood executives opposed him, afraid of the repercussions. (I'm not suggesting that Mr. Trump is Hitler, only that the guardians of institutions will turn a blind eye to the erosion of civil society when that blindness serves their interests.) "I was determined to go ahead," Chaplin wrote in his memoirs, "for Hitler must be laughed at."
So go ahead, laugh. It's not a distraction. It's a crucial tool in the fight against a surreal upending of democratic norms. The authoritarian-in-training who rages at every joke and slight shows his hand, and his weakness. Everyone who wants to resist over the next four years has a role to play, from legislators to students to stand-up comedians. It doesn't seem so funny now, but one day it will, and maybe that's the day the fight turns.
Barack Obama told his final news conference as president that the divisions in the U.S. gives fake news more traction.