FB: What other subject matter, besides shootings, feels worth approaching with special care?
SM: When you do stuff about the opioid crisis, it’s a lot harder to get comic traction. But I think we’ve managed. Those segments have been less of a laugh riot, but we’re lucky that we have an audience that’s willing to forgive the lack of jokes if they realize that the topic is serious.
FB: What kind of joke about the opioid crisis does work?
SM: When you can frame it in the absurdity of the fact that there was a town in West Virginia that filled enough prescriptions for painkillers to treat the entire Eastern Seaboard, you can make a joke off that. You can separate that from the real-world impact. This is something that’s absurd. It’s absurd that we allowed that to happen.
FB: So absurdity is humor’s saving grace?
SM: Yeah.
FB: What do you worry most about in terms of the lasting damage of Trump’s presidency?
SM: When I think of my kids, I worry the most — it feels clichéd to say — about climate change. I also want to stress that no matter who was president right now, I think that would still be a very scary thing. I don’t want to put that on Trump’s doorstep. Also, I want to live in a world where you can be kind to people and they can be kind to you if you have different political views. I do charity events every now and then, and there will be people who come up to me and say they voted for Trump. And we will have a nice conversation. I hope that’s not unique to me.
FB: I have relatives who voted for Trump.
SM: Can you still be kind to them and can they be kind to you?
FB: I love them, and they help me not to see this in really reductive ways. So when people say, “Everybody who voted for Donald Trump is a racist,” I know that not to be true. Everyone who voted for Donald Trump perhaps averted their gaze from racism, and we can make moral judgments about that.
SM: I agree with that 100 percent.
FB: Do you ever worry, whether it’s your show or The Times, that because we’re seen as creatures of the coast, our criticisms and focus on Trump actually embolden his supporters?
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