There’s a hysterical sketch on Comedy Central’s “Chappelle’s Show” called “Black Bush,” in which titular comedian Dave Chappelle plays a Bizarro World version of the former president during the Iraq War.

The bit, from 2004, includes his cabinet announcing plans to invade Iraq by declaring “We comin’ to see y’all, son!” then literally fleeing the room to avoid questions and telling a female journalist “Yes, I’m sure, b---h!” when he asserts Saddam Hussein bought yellow cake in Africa — not uranium, but actual church-lady cake wrapped in a “special CIA napkin.”

The premise worked because of the absurdity that an American president would act that way in public, especially cursing at a reporter.

Guess what? We’re now officially in Bizarro World: The real-life president of the United States recently called a female journalist a pig on camera.

There’s not a thing funny about that.

I talked to several female journalists about the video of Trump’s Nov. 14 verbal attack on Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force One. Lucey asked why he would not support the release of the Epstein files if he had nothing to hide. With startling venom, he stuck his finger in her face and hissed, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” Simply chilling.

“I wasn’t surprised he yelled at her,” said Tracy Everbach, a professor at University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism, who also worked at the Dallas Morning News and Boston Herald. “What made me angry was that her colleagues saw her being abused and decided, ‘I’m not going to say anything.’”

Trump’s prickliness with female reporters is well-documented, given past run-ins with the likes of White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor and others. Just this week, he verbally sparred with ABC’s Mary Bruce, and then declared that her network’s license should be revoked.

“I didn’t like how business carried on as usual,” said Shaka Cobb, 46, a former reporter for several Georgia outlets now working in the nonprofit world. “It would have been great if someone had stood up for her.”

Then again, to be a woman journalist sometimes means you’re completely unprotected. When I started working in newsrooms in the early 1990s, I encountered some of the last holdovers from journalism’s “Mad Men” era still confused by women in nonclerical positions.

The veteran reporters I interviewed told me stories about colleagues openly hitting on them, or sources “who acted like I was there to get a date,” Everbach said. “It was like, ‘Excuse me. I’m trying to do my job.’ There were all kinds of harassment. It was bad.”

Catherine Arnst, who like Lacey worked at Bloomberg, told me that when she covered Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, then a Democratic front-runner for the 1988 presidency, for Reuters, “there were hardly any women on the bus.” And the male reporters were colored by the sexual politics of the day. When Hart ended his candidacy amid a cheating scandal that, given the current climate, seems quaint, Arnst thought, “He’s dead in the water, but a lot of the men didn’t think it was a big deal.”

I’ve told my own stories of harassment on the job, but I must believe that my life in the industry was made easier by the presence of people like Everbach and Arnst, and that my tenure is an example to women younger than me. Jackie Majerus is co-founder and executive director of Youth Journalism International, a nonprofit that works with those aspiring journalists, most of them women.

“I try to show them that society can be better, but when the president of the United States thinks nothing of tossing off slurs to silence a question from a woman reporter, my students see it and their hopes for a brighter future erode,” she wrote me in an email.

I wish that the White House correspondents could rally like the former Pentagon reporters who collectively turned in their badges and left rather than allow Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to vet their information. But it’s not that simple.

“White House reporting is its own animal,” Everbach explained. “I don’t think a lot of them are there to get a big incendiary story. They’re there to follow the president and keep a watch out for something that might happen. But there is the fear that the second they start digging or writing something negative, they’re gonna get shut out. I think their hands are tied.”

But what did access get Lucey? Verbal abuse and humiliation while trapped on a plane with the guy who just yelled at her? And it’s not just the wrath of the president that reporters face. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is often openly hostile to journalists.

Arnst reminded me of a timely quote by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Baltimore City College graduate Russell Baker, who described his early career covering Congress as “waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me.” Depressing.

Jane Elizabeth, a retired journalist, former Washington Post deputy metro editor and managing editor at The Raleigh News & Observer, believes that the defense of others is less important than self-empowerment. “It’s more important for the journalists to speak up for themselves. In real time. On video that can be shared a zillion times throughout social media,“ she wrote to me. ”THAT is the play here, in this environment.”

Journalist Caitlin Kelly, who has written for The Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette and New York Daily News, said she’d have liked if Lucey had said “‘Excuse me, what did you just call me?’ Get him to say it twice. We need to see him standing his ground and be doubly abusive.”

Why would you let anyone speak to you that way? Kelly thinks it’s because of the reverence given the office of the American presidency. “Nobody would tolerate this from any other person,” she said.

If we’re going to stay in this business, and have to cover people who are hostile, journalists have to dig in and speak up.

“Recognize that accepting this treatment from the so-called leader of the free world and his tribe is harming journalism and demoralizing future journalists,” Elizabeth wrote on LinkedIn after the viral incident. “When you allow, justify or shrug off this behavior, you are endangering a free democratic press.”

This article has been updated to correct the state Sen. Gary Hart represented.