FINDING HUMOR IN HISSY FITS      PART 1 

THE RECENT BAD BEHAVIOR BETWEEN two problematic middle-school mentalities has been an embarrassment to us all. Yet what else is there to do but laugh? Here, in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, we share humor from several sources.

Image by Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times.

Keyboard Cowboys. Shawn McCreesh reports “Trump and Musk’s Relationship Melts Down in Spectacular Fashion,” The New York Times, June 6, 2025: “The moment had finally come,” McCreesh recounts, “and it was every bit as lowdown, vindictive, personal, petty, operatic, childish, consequential, messy and public as many had always expected it would be.”

This is the most concise characterization of Trump and Musk that I might imagine.

McCreesh observes, “There was a screwball element to their back-and-forth: Because Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are each the masters of their own social media platform, neither one was directly replying to the other. Anyone following along at home (which is to say, everyone) had to toggle between platforms to keep up with these keyboard cowboys as they aimed shots at each other.”

McCreesh continues, “ ‘THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTING’ was a top trending topic on Mr. Musk’s platform Thursday. There was a schoolyard aspect to their scrap as many on the playground rushed to jump in. ‘SPICY,’ Laura Loomer posted. ‘hey @realDonaldTrump lmk if u need any breakup advice,’ posted Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Mr. Musk’s children. Mr. Musk began to hit the ‘unfollow’ button on accounts belonging to close Trump allies such as Charlie Kirk and Stephen Miller.” 

If Trump and Musk had reliable adults in charge, they might have lost their online privileges. Alas, each of them sorta owes his own social media platform, Truth Social and X, Formerly Known as You Know What, respectively. 

An Onslaught of Memes. Aishvarya Kavi adds to the fun in reporting “Trump and Musk Fight, and the Internet Pulls Out the Popcorn,”The New York Times, June 5, 2025. She opens with “What happens when two billionaires with huge followings on social media start a public feud? Great memes.”

An Etymological Pause. For those of us living under a social media rock, Merriam-Webster defines meme “1: as an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media. 2: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”

Furthermore, M-W notes, “In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, British scientist Richard Dawkins defended his newly coined word meme, which he defined as ‘a unit of cultural transmission’…. Like any good meme, meme caught on and evolved, eventually developing the meaning known to anyone who spends time online, where it’s most often used to refer to any one of those silly captioned photos that the Internet can’t seem to get enough of.”

Full-Force Memes. “It was a messy divorce,” Aishvarya Kavi notes, “and the internet was watching from the sidelines. So, of course, the memes were out in full force.” 

She offered examples: “ ‘The big beautiful bill led to the big beautiful breakup,’ one person observed on X, Mr. Musk’s social media platform, referring to the disagreement over Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill that set off the clash. An X account devoted to political jokes posted a doctored image of an iPhone emergency alert: ‘THE GIRLS ARE CRASHING OUTTTTT,’ it announced.”

Tomorrow in Part 2 we’ll continue with more Kavi offerings and extend the humor search to the Brit Independent, our late-night TV, and my favorite satirist these days, Andy Borowitz. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025