The Art of Punching Up
Why are right wingers and rich people so bad at it?
Sometimes I file something to The New York Times and it kind of lingers in the machinery until the events that give it some urgency or timeliness are a little stale and the discourse has moved on. Other times I pitch something too far ahead of the discourse and it's too early to assign. It's like trying to time the ripeness of an avocado. Anyway, this one went mushy before anyone had a chance to eat it– we've moved on from Shane Gillis and Kelly Clarkson--but I think the argument is important and doesn't go stale generally so I'm publishing it on my personal corner of the Internet. Here it is:
This month, the defunct monthly satirical SPY magazine would have been 40 years old and those of us who were fans of it are celebrating its legacy, which lives on in the DNA of many publications. It’s famous among other things for introducing the world outside of New York City to all things Donald Trump in the late 80s, who it referred to variously, as a “short finger vulgarian” or failed “Queens casino operator.” In its April of 1991 issue, it compared him to an “impossibly venal puppet in a Punch-and-Judy show” who has “always given us a good laugh,” and a little too presciently noted that his “his image as a buffoon is just another example the press has protected him from real scrutiny for too long,” before proceeding to ruthlessly dissect his finances, extensively cataloguing the lies and exaggerations he used to obtain millions in loans from banks.
I discovered SPY in the early ‘00s when I was 22 years old and had recently moved to New York City from central Alabama via college in North Carolina. The magazine had folded a few years prior, so I went to the public library and read archived issues front to back and began accumulating them from a grungy basement store in the East Village that sold old magazines. This came in handy as inspiration a year or two later when I co-founded Gawker, a snarky website that, like SPY, was about powerful people in New York City. I left Gawker in 2003 to cover New York power brokers more traditionally at New York Magazine, but what I learned from SPY was that you could use humor and wit alongside fact-finding and journalism to get under the skin of people in power who were abusing their privileges.
But it only works if your barbs and critiques are directed toward more powerful people. You have to punch up, not down. Punching up is how regular people hold those who are more powerful accountable. Punching down doesn’t have a moral imperative and more often than not, it’s cruel. Increasingly, I think too many people don’t know the difference.
Take, for example, Comedian Shane Gillis, whose most recent monologue on Saturday Night Live included a bit about women at the gym, who Gillis said “just dress like whores now.” Explaining the joke ruins the humor, but there’s no humor in that joke anyway, so I figure there’s no risk of ruining it. The supposed punchline is that women wear form-fitting gym clothes to the gym–which is to say, they wear gym clothes that are gym clothes to the gym–and this is de facto evidence of women attempting to lure men sexually at the gym. And if they want to be sexy at the gym, it’s because they’re whores, which is just an old fashioned way of puritanically asserting that any enjoyment they get out of sex with more than one partner is morally wrong. This is not funny because there is no subversion or absurdity in it, and it’s the observation of a man who does not know what sweat wicking fabric is and has never set foot inside of a Lululemon, or possibly a Foot Locker, or the men’s athletic section at Walmart. I also don't think he has this kind of moral panic at the beach, declaring every passing woman in a bikini a whore on the basis that she's wearing form fitting fabric that reveals a lot of skin. It’s just an echo of sexist behavior women are on the receiving end of at the gym all the time–and partly because men like Gillis think of it as their space, and women are just visitors, or more to the point, interlopers.
A good joke or skewering also uses absurdities, hypocrisies, and surprising subversions of what all know to be true to tickle the part of the brain that makes something seem funny. Telling stories that reverse calcified power structures is one way to do that.
If Gillis had showed up at the Tour de France and made fun of all the male cyclists in their “slutty little shorts,” it would have gotten closer to being an actual joke because men who enjoy having a lot of sex or dress for sex appeal are simply not degraded and insulted for it the way women are. Calling a woman a whore is punching down because when it comes to the way society policies how people conduct their sex lives, men have more freedom than women. Calling a man in Spandex a whore is a reversal of that power structure. There is no equivalent word for whore that applies to men as a gender and disparages them for having lots of sex indiscriminately or insinuates that if they are having a lot of sex with different people, it must be transactional. So a man objectifying and putting down women in a clichéd way is not edgy humor, it’s just the status quo in a society where women are punished if they conform to patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty by going to the gym and making themselves fit and skinny (though that is not why many of us go to the gym)--and are also punished if they don’t conform to that aesthetic. Shorter Gillis: there are creeps at the gym who make being at the gym uncomfortable for women, and I’m one of them. If you find this funny, you may be a creep at the gym.
Another way of misusing a power imbalance and punching down is to retaliate disproportionately to a slight by someone far less powerful. Kelly Clarkson learned this the hard way when she went after a Brooklyn magic store that displayed a one of a kind animatronic bird made by a San Francisco artist and a clerk told her it wasn’t for sale and offered to show her something similar for $2000. This entire episode seemed to be predicated upon a misunderstanding. You can apparently commission your own bird from the artist for $15,000 and Clarkson interpreted that as a $15,000 price tag for the bird in the store and was offended when they suggested she look at the cheaper bird they had on hand. She assumed they were being snobby to her and insinuating that she couldn’t afford it. As someone who lives in Brooklyn and reserves right to skewer upper middle class Brooklyn affectations like twee boutiques with expensive merch that traffic in luxury whimsy there are reasons to lob some light ribbing in the direction of stores like The Art of Play, whose kindred neighbors will sell you drawstring linen pants that cost a small mortgage payment or pricey vegan cupcakes for dogs. That kind of light skewering doubles as marketing. (You want to see the $2000 pants, don’t you? And now you need to see the $15,000 bird!)
But that is not what Clarkson did. A few minutes after she left the store, she posted to her millions of internet followers that the store had snobbily refused to sell her the bird because they thought she was too poor to buy it. I am guessing Ms. Clarkson was having a bad day to begin with, and given that she grew up in Texas with parents who were a first grade teacher and an engineer respectively, I imagine that she has not always been treated with the respect in the rarified circles she runs in now that she’s rich and famous. But she knows enough about the internet to know that siccing her millions of followers on a small business would be very bad for them–and it was. They got harassment and threats–some of them violent–and this extended past the store and its employees to people in the neighborhood who supported it. One local was harassed simply for visiting the store after being identified in a photo.
Here, the problem is proportionality. Even in actual warfare, symmetry matters, which is why international law says you cannot disproportionately retaliate against an enemy in a way that makes civilian deaths and property damage egregiously exceed military gain. This is not a literal war and both parties will live, but this is Clarkson punching down. If she were putting a large telecom company on blast—or a major airline, or health insurance company, or Palantir–this would be a different story. Kelly Clarkson is not more powerful than any of those institutions. If Clarkson wanted to point her millions of fans toward the fact that a lot of health insurance companies use AI to deny lifesaving benefits to people, profiting at the expense of the public good, we’d all be applauding her.
That said, in light of recent events involving healthcare CEOs, I feel compelled to note that punching up does not include murder, which is not, shall we say, an ethical form of criticism. But I think most of us intuitively know that. And anyone with a basic understanding of what criticism is also knows that it’s not harassment, so sending Clarkson herself violent threats–or Gillis, for that matter–is not punching up, either.
Punching up is about holding people with power accountable when they are abusing that power. If Gillis wanted to do that, he could have skewered men who sexually harass women at the gym.
The biggest offender of punching down, however, is SPY’s favorite target for punching up: President Donald Trump. We all know what the archetype of the bully is; it’s the person who attacks people who are vulnerable to make himself feel powerful and superior. There’s nothing absurd or subversive about it; it’s just someone with power abusing it to hurt people without power.
Trump has insulted or threatened women, immigrants, Black people, trans people, and other members of marginalized communities, and he said soldiers who died in service to their country, were “losers” and “suckers.” He mocked a disabled reporter at this paper who has a condition that affects his joints and movement, which Trump mimicked by jerking his arms around and saying, “you ought to see this guy.” He has said disparaging things about countries where people are struggling economically or because of famine and war, calling them “shithole” countries. And there’s a kind of right winger who thinks this is all hilarious because they, too, punch down at vulnerable people, sometimes while spouting Bible verses on social media quoting a man who commanded his followers to care for the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized. It is simply bullying and contempt for people who suffer.
By virtue of being President of the United States, Trump is arguably the most powerful person in the world, and he could choose to hold people who are peers or near peers accountable, but instead he saves his ire for people who are struggling the most. His followers don’t lack targets for punching up–the tech oligarchs who are building data centers in their backyard whether they like it or not, the elected officials who capitulate to industry in ways that make their healthcare untenably expensive, the employers who are constantly demanding more work for less pay. When they choose to mock single mothers on food assistance and the like instead, they’re not just failing to be funny, they’re exhibiting a moral calculus that devalues humanity and overvalues money and power.
I once wrote in a column that explaining ethics to Donald Trump was like explaining existentialism to a chicken. This is not a particularly funny joke, but if you try, you can probably imagine looking a chicken squarely in the eye and intoning “It is not the will that gives value to the possibility,” as it blinks at you uncomprehendingly, its 2.8 brain cells struggling to figure out why the largest hole is your face is moving. Now imagine that same look on the President’s face when someone uses the word “emoluments.”
This is fair and reasonable because I am punching up and Donald Trump is not the vulnerable party. To be specific, he is $2.2 billion in 2025 income not vulnerable, and should be mocked and criticized by journalists, ethics experts, voters, comedians–and why not?--Kelly Clarkson.
If you're a SPY fan, some of the original staffers are publishing stories from the early issues on Substack, and of course, you can find all of the old issues on Google Books.
As always, thanks for the support. I'm adding some new dates to the workshop schedule through the end of the year, so check the Workshops link if you're interested in developing a writing practice, writing personal essays, or writing op-eds. (And there are other ways to support my work, if you're inclined.)
Thank you for reading!
E