It’s a phenomenon that can’t be imitated or reproduced and that won’t last; in fact, I think its time has already passed.
People latched onto it with a show of relief—I wouldn’t call it a sigh; it was more like a scream—because it was a moment of comedy that everyone could afford to laugh at without dividing along cutthroat partisan lines.
It was like the brief interlude of humor interrupting the mounting horror of a classic tragedy, the comic relief that gives you perspective and brings you back to yourself. It’s the drunken porter answering the knock at the gate in Macbeth: the sudden sharp contrast that lets you exit the darkening drama just for a moment, just long enough to realize what you’re seeing—what you’ve become used to, how far you’ve strayed from “normal”—and to recognize what you’re expecting: something terrible is going to happen.