The late night anti-Trump comedy barrage is even stronger than it was during the presidential campaign.

It’s boring, the same old repetitive, tiresome variations on the same theme.

And Trump humor is certainly not edgy, unless you think that finagling a new word past the network censor is somehow subversive.

But worst of all, this humor cheapens the art of comedy. It makes good comedians mediocre and the rest of us lower our standards.

Gotchas, nanny nanny boo boos and political agreement have replaced more artful ways of thinking about what’s funny and what’s not.

Comedy is an art. Comedians, at least the good ones, are artists. All this Trump humor reduces their artfulness, trivializes their work and makes us forget just how important and complex comedy is supposed to be.

Imagine how you would react if other art forms like music, painting and sculpture were threatened the same way. That’s how you should view the comedy threat.

More on that later, but first let’s take a look at some numbers.

“An incredible gift,” TV talk show host Stephen Colbert calls Trump. “It’s a gift that keeps on giving.”

These jokes just keep on keeping on. According to a recent study by George Mason University, Trump has been the butt of more late night jokes in the three months since his inaugural than other presidents have been in a year.

Recently Stephen Colbert did a long, angry bit attacking Donald Trump for insulting CBS newsperson John Dickerson.

During an interview with Dickerson, the host of CBS News’s flagship show “Face the Nation,” Trump called it  “Deface the Nation.”

Colbert responded on his own show by calling Trump, among other things, a “prickdator” and using a term that may get him investigated by the Federal Communications Commission.

Colbert has gotten a lot of notoriety from this exchange. And he’s fine with it.  “An incredible gift,” Colbert calls Trump. “It’s a gift that keeps on giving.”

Audience numbers show just how much of a gift this is. Late night ratings have risen, especially for the hosts who do the most Trump humor.

Anger is the driving force. As one TV expert put it, “Humor coupled with righteous indignation works even more when you are pissed off.  If they (the Trump comics) can articulate anger in a funny way, that is ratings gold.”

Gold, baby! Ratings and righteousness, the new way to judge comedy.

It is now cut and dried: If you agree with the comic’s politics and he or she is also angry, then it’s wonderful, and you watch. If you disagree with the politics, you turn it off. Either escape or unconditional love — that’s more like the behavior of 3-year-olds than a way to judge artistry.

In realty, for comics and their audiences, Trump jokes are not a gift. They are a trap, or maybe a gift that leads you to indulge in bad habits the way a Potato Chip of the Month Club Gift Certificate would be for someone who is overweight.

And it’s repetitive and formulaic. Trump does something outrageous; the comic makes fun of him that night.

Thrust and parry, thrust and parry, but not rapier wit. No swords here, more like one blunt instrument hitting another blunt instrument. 

Hey, so what’s the big deal? It’s only comedy.

Comedy is not separate from the so-called higher arts. It is not art’s stepchild, but rather an integral part of the creative family.

Good comedy requires an enormous amount of imagination and preparation. Standup may be the most difficult of all performing arts.

Innovative comedians like Steve Martin, Dave Chappelle, Robin Williams or Louis CK dig deep, using humor to find what the writer Julian Code Bara calls “the sweet spot between light and darkness.”

Good comedy does more than make you laugh. It makes you think, often in ways that make you nervous.

This sort of humor is edgy, disorienting and even upsetting, like the 2017 Honolulu Biennial art show, Steve Reich’s minimalist music, or Elvis’s “Hound Dog” in 1956.

And they often do this by inhabiting the character they are satirizing, not just attacking her. That’s what made Colbert so good on his former show, “The Colbert Report.”

If you want an example of outstanding Trump humor, check out Kate McKinnon’s nuanced Hillary Clinton portrayal on Saturday Night Live where Trump is the buffoon but Clinton comes off not just smart and confident but also vulnerable and a little scary.

One of the ways to resist Donald Trump is not to obsess on him. Unfortunately, late night comics are doing just that.

You could change the channel. Late night, you can always find a rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond” where you can watch Peter Boyle, who was such a great monster in “Young Frankenstein,” which starred Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the script with the director Mel Brooks.

Now that’s good comedy.