“I was not expecting to play Donald Trump after 2016 in the months prior to that election,” says writer/performer Ted Meredith, who plays Donald Trump for Esther’s Follies (he’s also their resident Vladimir Putin, and, should the need arise again, Honey Boo-Boo). “I was doing every sort of convention-center-handshake, you know, parade-photos-with-a-Trump-impersonator thing I could because I was like, I got to wring all the money out of this cash cow because there's no way I'll be doing this two months from now. And here we are. I was probably more relieved than most when I got to take a little break after his presidency finally wound down.”
That break was short-lived, of course, since Trump started his 2024 presidential campaign almost immediately after leaving office in 2021.
Meredith says that unpredictability is one of the reliable constants involved with producing a weekly, topical political comedy show at Esther’s. The show’s been performed in downtown Austin for nearly 50 years, beginning back in 1977 and continuing to this day; they even kept things going online during the Covid lockdowns. “Yeah, during the pandemic, we would do a weekly Donald Trump zoom meeting; every week we'd have a new script, pretty much, about some new disaster going on in the White House,” Meredith says. “And I mean, that was kind of the same during the presidency. We would come in [to our] writers’ meeting on Monday with all of these bits about stuff that had happened in the administration that weekend and by Thursday they'd be irrelevant. We'd be moved on to an entirely different story.”
These days, staying up-to-date with the changing political scene is part of the job. For context, for a piece scheduled to start running on KUT on July 20, I spoke with Meredith, fellow writer/performer Shaun Branigan and producer/founder Shannon Sedwick on July 9 – after the presidential debate between Trump and President Joe Biden but a few days before the assassination attempt on Trump and 12 days before Biden left the presidential race.
The challenges aren’t limited to breaking news; there’s also been a big change in the political climate over the years, including some people’s willingness to laugh at the same jokes. “Our first years, everybody in Austin – whether they were conservative or liberal, they didn't mind coming to a place like Esther's and laughing together. But that changed,” Sedwick says. “That changed after the pandemic. It became a little bit more difficult to get people to laugh at something that was about them. But we still manage to have a good blend of… we definitely make fun of Biden and we make fun of Trump, of course. But we definitely always try to make fun of everybody equally if we can.”
“But it's difficult because we want to make everybody in the audience laugh,” says Branigan, “and everybody is so polarized nowadays that if you come down too hard from one direction, you end up alienating half of the people who came anyway.”
“You want to be talking about what's happening right now, what's going on and affecting people's lives,” Meredith says, “but you always want to find a way to do it in a way that's palatable, in a way that isn't expected, in a way that's different than just, you know, people posting memes on Facebook. We've got to find our own voice to it.”
“Yeah, we talk about it in terms of coming at it sideways,” Branigan says. “And the thing is, it's got to be, number one, it's gotta be funny. If it's not funny, it's not gonna go on the show and generally listing things that happened in the news isn't funny. You know, you have to have a perspective.”
Meredith says finding the funny thing is what it’s all about. “When you come up with a joke, you know, like before you go to bed or while you're in the shower or in traffic on the way home and then you're like, hey guys, what do you think about this? And we're like, yeah, let's go ahead and give it a try. You put it up and then the audience loves it – there hardly any better feeling. I know it keeps me off drugs.”
Esther's Follies is onstage every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.
