MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Did you hear the one about President Trump? Or, more precisely, did you hear all 3,128 jokes? A think tank that has studied the content of late-night comedy for the past 26 years said Donald Trump was the butt of more jokes in 2017 than any other public figure has for a single year. By a lot. He beat the previous record of 1,816, set by Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016, said the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University in a study released Friday 11-9-18]. Prior to that, the record was 1,717 by former President Bill Clinton in 1998, the year of Monica Lewinsky…There were a total of 6,337 political jokes in the show’s monologues last year, and Trump was the subject of nearly half of them. Presidential humor has always been a staple of late-night comedy, but hosts would often make a couple of jokes about the president and quickly move on to other news stories, said Bill Carter, author of ‘The Late Shift’ about the television comedy shows. That’s not the case anymore, he said.”
–The Associated Press, “Hear the One About Trump? You’ve Probably Heard a Lot,” The New York Times online, November 9, 2018