Donald Trump takes office as the most ridiculed presidential candidate in the history of late-night television talk shows. Not only did he far surpass the number of jokes directed at his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, but he even exceeded the totals aimed at Bill Clinton during his scandal-plagued presidency two decades ago.
A new analysis of late-night humor by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found that the New York developer was the subject of 1,817 jokes between Jan. 1, 2016 and Nov. 11, 2016, a few days after Election Day. That’s more than triple the 506 jokes directed at Hillary Clinton. Going back to the 1992 contest, CMPA found that comedians have never focused on a presidential candidate the way they have on Trump.
[ Every president is a minority leader. Trump will be too. ]
Here’s how we did our research
We analyzed four late-night comedy programs: those hosted by Jimmy Fallon (“The Tonight Show” on NBC), Stephen Colbert (“The Late Show” on CBS), Jimmy Kimmel (“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC) and Trevor Noah (“The Daily Show” on Comedy Central). All four treated Trump as comedy gold. The attention to Trump did not vary with his poll numbers; in the joke counts he was always No. 1. (Our analysis did not include “Saturday Night Live” because, compared with the nightly talk shows, its political content was relatively infrequent).
Every late-night talk show laughed almost twice as much at Trump than at Clinton.
In fact, they laughed at him far more than at any previous candidate, really.
From the start of the first major-party convention on July 18 through Nov. 11, for example, the pattern for three of the four late-night comics examined was almost identical. Among the jokes directed at the two major-party nominees, 81 percent of Colbert’s jokes focused on Trump, as did 80 percent of Noah’s and 78 percent of Kimmel’s. On NBC, Fallon interviewed Trump on air in September quite congenially, and was criticized for not being more critical of the former host of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
[ Yes, Trump will face a backlash if he doesn’t deliver on his promises. ]
And yet Fallon told more jokes about his fellow TV personality than about Clinton (64 percent vs. 36 percent).
As a candidate, Trump reached historic heights as a late-night comedy target. Mitt Romney, the previous Republican nominee, was the subject of only 1,061 jokes during all of 2012, just over half the jokes aimed at Trump in less time.
Trump jokes also outnumbered those aimed at 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) (1,358 jokes) or George W. Bush during his 2004 campaign for reelection (1,169 jokes), as well as the Democratic candidates running in those years. As shown in the chart below, the late-night comics consistently had more to say about Republicans than Democrats.
In addition to examining whom the comedians were joking about, we examined what they were joking about. We examined the jokes during two separate segments of the campaign. First, we measured from the start of the primaries up to the start of the first nominating convention (Feb. 1 through July 17, 2016).
Second, we measured from the start of the nomination conventions through the general election and a few days beyond (July 18 through Nov. 11, 2016).
For both major party nominees during both time periods, personal matters dominated the humor: 87 percent of the Trump jokes and nearly 85 percent of the Clinton jokes touched on character, personality or other personal traits.
Of course, what else would we expect? Late-night comics focus on personalities. After all, human foibles are often rich veins for humor, especially given the larger-than-life personalities on the 2016 ballot. Still, with more policy content, the jokes better inform the viewers who are also voters. That’s important. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of the electorate relied on late-night comedy shows to learn about the campaigns.
It’s not over till it’s over. And maybe not even then.
For Trump, though, the worst may be yet to come. Bill Clinton’s top year as a joke target came in 1998, the year he was impeached for lying about his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky, bringing in 1,717 jokes. Meanwhile, George W. Bush’s top year was 2006, during a rough midterm election for the Republicans and increasing chaos after the invasion of Iraq, when he was hit with 1,213 late-night jokes. Barack Obama was hit with 768 jokes as a presidential candidate in 2008 and with 936 jokes during 2009, his first year in the White House.
For all three presidents, the comics were tougher toward them when they were serving in office. Trump might wish to get ready.
Stephen J. Farnsworth is professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Mary Washington, where he directs the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies.
S. Robert Lichter is professor of communication at George Mason University, where he also directs the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
Deanne Canieso is a PhD student in communication at George Mason University.

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© Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/21/donald-trump-will-probably-be-the-most-ridiculed-president-ever/
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January 21, 2017
— In John Lee Hancock’s bio-drama “The Founder,” Northwest suburban businessman Ray Kroc, played by Michael Keaton, beholds an empty tract of land on Lee Street in Des Plaines that will become the site for the first franchised McDonald’s restaurant.
The movie, now in theaters, also shows us Kroc’s brick home in the Scarsdale subdivision of Arlington Heights, the village where he hobnobs with the social elite at the Rolling Green Country Club.
These locations, along with the first McDonald’s restaurants in Schaumburg, Waukegan, Milwaukee and other Midwestern places, look as if they’ve been photographed at their original sites.
Nope. It’s all Hollywood sleight-of-eye magic.
All those key settings in “The Founder” were built or photographed in the state of Georgia, where tax incentives, milder weather, and less expensive labor attracted the budget-conscious producers.
The film is the true story of how struggling salesman Kroc created a multibillion-dollar hamburger empire.
Michael Corenblith, a two-time Oscar-nominated production designer, found old photographs to help him reconstruct Kroc’s first franchised McDonald’s, built in 1955 in Des Plaines. (A replica building now stands on Lee Street near the original restaurant’s site.)
Because of their limited budget and ultrafast 34-day shooting schedule, the filmmakers had to be resourceful in showing McDonald’s restaurants all over the United States without actually leaving Georgia.
So they repurposed their “Des Plaines” building.
“When you see Schaumburg, when you see Minneapolis, when you see all the McDonald’s from around the country, those are subtle reworkings of only one set,” Corenblith said.
“Just by changing the parking lot stripes configuration, it was a very subtle way to tell the audience that, no, this isn’t the place you just saw because the cars are now parked perpendicularly and not diagonally or parallel. ”
Corenblith’s eye for authentic detail fooled even Keaton. He assumed the crew had found an old McDonald’s restaurant and rehabbed it for the film shoot.
“We gave him a tour, backstage as it were, to show him that we had built this structure from the ground up,” Corenblith said.
He searched carefully for a Georgia house that could serve as Kroc’s brick colonial in Arlington Heights, complete with deciduous trees native to the Northwest suburbs but less common in Georgia. He found what he was looking for in the Atlanta suburb of Avondale Estates, though the house has little resemblance to the Arlington Heights original.
“I felt I had a pretty good sense of what that regional architecture felt like in Chicago,” Corenblith said.
That’s because he had already worked in Chicago on Walter Hill’s 1988 buddy-cop movie “Red Heat. ” Every weekend, he bolted over to Oak Park to see examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture and noted how the suburbs looked.
An owner of Kroc’s actual Arlington Heights house for the last 45 years says she’ll watch the movie this weekend to make sure the stand-in lives up to her home.
“I tell people when they find out this was Ray Kroc’s house not to be too impressed,” Gina Kenney said. “It’s not a mega-mansion. It’s been a warm and wonderful house and a great place for me to raise my children. But it is kind of exciting to live in the house where Ray Kroc lived when he created McDonald’s. ”
Scenes at Arlington Heights’ Rolling Green Country Club, where Kroc and his wife, Ethel, were members, were filmed at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta. Kroc, in the film, doesn’t feel a part of the country club world. But it’s at Rolling Green that he signs up fellow members as his first investors in McDonald’s franchises.
The actual Rolling Green Country Club has a board room named for Kroc.
One of the goals Corenblith had for “The Founder” was to dramatize the conflict between the old, very first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernadino, California, emblematic of pre-World War II roadside architecture, and the golden arches franchise version, emblematic of the space-age optimism of the post-World War II era.
The original script for “The Founder” called for all restaurant shots to be during the daytime. Cinematographer John Schwartzman lobbied to do some at night, so that the lighted building resembled a jewel box.
“These [early restaurants] represented the crown jewels of this empire,” Corenblith said. “We wanted to present them in a very archivally correct way, but also in a dramatically enhanced way. ”
When Keaton, as Kroc, sees his first set of golden arches illuminated against a night sky, he looks stunned, as if witnessing the landing of an alien spacecraft.
But Corenblith’s first priority was to make his settings not alien but everyday, even for viewers from the suburbs where Kroc lived and worked. He wanted to create a convincing environment that’s all the better if audiences don’t notice it, he said. “If I can do this and not leave my fingerprints on it, it’s kind of like pulling off a great bank job. “

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© Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2017/0121/Here-s-how-the-film-The-Founder-recreated-spots-that-featured-in-McDonald-s-founder-Ray-Kroc-s-life
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