Why J.D. Vance 'keeps bombing' with painful attempts at humor: analysis

Former President Donald Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, is completely unable to tell a proper joke and can barely interact with other human beings in an organic way, wrote Slate senior editor Sam Adams — and there's a reason for this that reveals the fundamental kind of person he is.

In his latest column, Adams analyzes why Vance "keeps bombing" when he attempts to make jokes during campaign stops.

Vance certainly attempts to engage in humor, wrote Adams, but the way he does is telling. For example, during one rally earlier this summer when Vance stated, “Democrats say that it is racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I’m sure they’re gonna call that racist too ”— a line that he tried to play off for laughs but that mostly just left observers confused what he was even trying to say.

"The trouble isn’t that these are bad jokes. It’s that they aren’t jokes at all," wrote Adams. "There’s no distance between what Vance is saying and what he means to say, no dots for his audience to connect. At best, it’s humor of the 'Stop hitting yourself' variety, the work of a bully masquerading as a class clown. But Vance doesn’t have the deftness to pull off the ruse, let alone the insight to hit his targets where it hurts ... Vance’s quips are all drawn from the same well of barely concealed resentment."

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This stands in contrast to Trump, who, while his humor is often ugly and demeaning, actually came from a place of understanding how to keep a crowd hanging and often ended up funny to onlookers simply because his thoughts go all over the place. Vance, wrote Adams, doesn't have the finesse to pull this off.

"When Vance attempts to be playful, as when he asked the proprietor of a deli in Kenosha, Wisconsin, if he had 'any food here you really don’t like,' to bring back to the journalists on his plane, it comes off as simple petulance," wrote Adams. While Vance is trying to get the media to laugh at themselves here, it is "soured by the sense that Vance isn’t kidding at all.

The vitriol bleeds right through; he can’t seem to help himself." In other words, when he says something meant to be funny, "the humor’s only purpose is to camouflage the bitterness beneath."

All of this, Adams noted, comes at the same time that Trump unsuccessfully tried to attack Vice President Kamala Harris over her laugh, and as his supporters made an uproar about her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for his self-deprecating quips about liking "white guy tacos."

"What bothers them, I think, isn’t Walz’s toothless quip but his willingness to humble himself, especially in front of a Black woman — to be the object of the gag rather than its author," wrote Adams. "People like J.D. Vance are used to telling others to laugh it off, but they don’t like it when the joke’s on them."