By skyforbes 
Ernie Kovacs was the king of TV disruption in the 1950s. He broke the frame of the new medium with his revolutionary camera tricks and influenced all comedians who followed. Kovacs tilted the screen, slowed and sped up time, used silence, and employed sudden blackouts. These TV tricks became the Kovacs trinity of disruption, shock, and reset.
David Letterman repeated this process in countless ways with his watermelon drops, dropping cue cards and stupid pet tricks.
Monty Python used visual non sequiturs, frame breaks, and the giant foot randomly stomping on scenes.
The original Saturday Night Live ensemble used live and unfiltered comic breaks before the show was introduced.
MTV filled the screen with music videos that disrupted the viewing experience through perpetual jump cuts.
South Park used chaotic stop-motion with paper figures.
Family Guy used silly frame breaks.
The Simpsons used cutaways and meta-jokes.
The Kovacs formula even spilled over into TikTok videos with silence, editing disruptions, and screen manipulations.
The Kovacs trinity rule was simple: disrupt, create a WTF moment, and blackout to let the audience absorb the disruption. This comic video loop of disruption was all for fun, but what if it became weaponized for politics? Enter Trump.
This dark chapter in US media broke news consumption norms and introduced a new kind of shock politics that disoriented and exhausted the average TV viewer. The endless social media disruptions, with almost no pause, triggered chaos fatigue and viewer burnout among many Americans. The Trump shock style demanded ever more outrageous WTF moments to keep dominating the news cycle. The Trump/Kovacs loop began slowly eating itself, with diminishing returns among most news consumers except for a dwindling minority of shock addicts. Even the most revolutionary form of media disruption needs a pause to reset before it becomes white noise.
Kovacs knew you needed to end the joke. He also understood, like Marshall McLuhan, that the medium was the message. Trump went further and let the message consume the medium. Kovacs disrupted TV to expand perception. Trump disrupted TV and social media to preserve his dominance. We are now at a turning point once more. Covid led to the demented Stop the Steal implosion. Will the current MAGA chaos lead to martial law? No comedian would ever dare go this far.
Learn more about Kovacs to Trump: Media Disruption Review.