This is going to be painful for a lot of people to hear, but it’s imperative: Trump impersonations are low-tier comedy. The lowest tier.

A most welcome gift of the new year will be if not a single Trump impression is ever performed, ever again.

Generally speaking, impersonations are rarely funny. Or at least, they’re rarely funny for more than a brief moment of surprise when a person is able to perfectly capture something readily associated with a certain individual, like a celebrity’s unique tic or demeanor. The problem is that the person who performs an impression almost always keeps going for far longer than that brief moment. They go on, and on, and on.

As the captive audience, you’re faced with a dilemma — either keep laughing politely, which ensures the performance will continue, or don’t and hope it ends. Both scenarios are uncomfortable, and it’s the impersonator who put you in the unfortunate position of having to choose.

Think of all the prominent Trump renditions: Alec Baldwin’s, Jimmy Fallon’s, James Austin Johnson’s, Meryl Streep’s, the ones done by countless stand-up comedians. Not a single one of them is memorable or remarkably humorous. To the contrary, they’re all maddeningly the same. They put on a wig, adopt a sour pout and don their faces in copper-tone powder. They speak with a gruff accent and say things like “bigly,” a word made up by Democrats who couldn’t decipher that what Trump was always saying was “big league.” They purse their lips, excessively utilize superlatives and mimic the well-worn hand gestures.

Zzz…

There was perhaps a short period of time in 2011, when Trump was pretending to run for president back then, that impressions of the future president were novel and maybe even a little funny. But we are now nearly 15 years past and the originality has faded just a bit.

There is the occasional exception. Comedian Matt Friend does a wildly funny Trump impersonation, but the key isn’t the mimicry itself — as it is for virtually everyone else who does one — but the original concepts, scenarios and monologues Friend writes to accompany it. In one stand-up bit, Friend imagines an alternative Oval Office meeting between Trump and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, wherein Trump assumes Mamdani is the cousin of the king of Saudi Arabia, who “Trump” says is, “like, a lighter brown; he’s a little bit of a lighter brown, I would say — just a lighter shade of a brown.”

The joke is not the impression for the sake of it. It’s the hyperbolic fantasy of Trump making a tacky comment in a formal setting that includes important world leaders. That takes effort. A widely copied impersonation doesn’t.

Happy New Year. RIP Trump impressions.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of "Traitors: The Democrat Party’s Collapse into Anti-American Filth."