Barack Obama laughs at but not with
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Obama is much more likely to reserve his sharpest flashes of wit for his adversaries. | AP Photos
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By TODD S. PURDUM | 5/2/14 5:08 AM EDT
President Barack Obama is very smart (as he could tell you). He is also very funny (and the first to laugh at his own jokes). He is a master of comic timing, has an appealing sense of the absurdities of his chosen profession and an unerring ear for the withering one-liner.
As long as the subject is someone else.
When it comes to the sine qua non of political humor ? devastating self-deprecation ? Obama is less skilled or at least less willing to play an A game, as this weekend?s White House Correspondents? dinner is once again likely to show.
Sure, Obama makes fun of himself: for his big ears, his graying hair, his sagging approval ratings, even his bad bowling (though he stepped on a joke about the last subject with Jay Leno in 2009 by adding an ill-considered ad lib about his Special Olympics-level skill, for which he was forced to apologize). And the president has proved himself a good sport, enduring Zach Galifianakis? absurdist insults on ?Between Two Ferns,? where he went to promote his health care plan.
But Obama is much more likely to reserve his sharpest flashes of wit for his adversaries, antagonists and even (in a kind of throwback Henny Youngmanesque style) for the wife he invariably portrays as hectoring.
And as is often the case with other rhetorical aspects of his presidency, Obama sometimes seems to deliver his jokes ? however effective they may be ? with the disembodied distance of someone observing his own performance.
?Here?s my take on President Obama,? said Mark Katz, a veteran Democratic humor writer. ?I think he?s smart, he?s funny, he?s self-aware. To me, it doesn?t sound like his voice. To me, he looks like a guy having a great time reading the really funny jokes his staff put together, but I just don?t hear his voice. I just don?t.?
Obama generally eschews the kind of deadly self-directed stinger George W. Bush delivered at his first Gridiron Club dinner in 2001, when he allowed: ?Those stories about my intellectual capacity do get under my skin. You know for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, ?Intelligence Briefing.?? And near the end of his tenure, Bush said he was considering ?something really fun and creative? for his memoirs, ?You know, maybe a pop-up book.?
Secretary of State John Kerry is often regarded as a stiff?s stiff, but he won the room at this year?s Gridiron by mocking his and his wife?s wealth, saying he felt at home in white tie and tails: ?Or, as we call it at our house, workout gear. Or, as we call it at our other house, pajamas. ? Or, as we call it at our other house, swimming costumes.?
John F. Kennedy retired the self-deprecation title more than half a century ago, when he was gearing up to run for president in 1958. At that year?s Gridiron dinner, he forever inoculated himself from charges that he was coasting to election on his family fortune, reading a mock telegram from his father: ?Dear Jack: Don?t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I?ll be damned if I?m going to pay for a landslide.?
?To me, that?s the Rosetta Stone of political humor,? Katz said. ?You imagine anyone else in the room saying that joke, it would have been devastating. He got there first, and he owned it, and no one could touch him.?
(Also on POLITICO: White House Correspondents? Dinner weekend party list 2014)
Obama?s former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, insisted that this president ?very much understands that you don?t get very far purely by destroying the other side.?
Yet when asked for examples of Obama?s best self-deprecating lines, Favreau struggled a bit for an answer, eventually citing jokes about big ears and bad poll numbers. ?In the early years,? Favreau added, ?he joked about the image of him as a Messiah, and he joked about his birth certificate.? (At the Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York in 2008, Obama declared, ?Contrary to the rumors you?ve heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton ??)
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/barack-obama-106261.html#ixzz30qVqh0gP
68
7578
Obama is much more likely to reserve his sharpest flashes of wit for his adversaries. | AP Photos
Close
By TODD S. PURDUM | 5/2/14 5:08 AM EDT
President Barack Obama is very smart (as he could tell you). He is also very funny (and the first to laugh at his own jokes). He is a master of comic timing, has an appealing sense of the absurdities of his chosen profession and an unerring ear for the withering one-liner.
As long as the subject is someone else.
When it comes to the sine qua non of political humor ? devastating self-deprecation ? Obama is less skilled or at least less willing to play an A game, as this weekend?s White House Correspondents? dinner is once again likely to show.
Sure, Obama makes fun of himself: for his big ears, his graying hair, his sagging approval ratings, even his bad bowling (though he stepped on a joke about the last subject with Jay Leno in 2009 by adding an ill-considered ad lib about his Special Olympics-level skill, for which he was forced to apologize). And the president has proved himself a good sport, enduring Zach Galifianakis? absurdist insults on ?Between Two Ferns,? where he went to promote his health care plan.
But Obama is much more likely to reserve his sharpest flashes of wit for his adversaries, antagonists and even (in a kind of throwback Henny Youngmanesque style) for the wife he invariably portrays as hectoring.
And as is often the case with other rhetorical aspects of his presidency, Obama sometimes seems to deliver his jokes ? however effective they may be ? with the disembodied distance of someone observing his own performance.
?Here?s my take on President Obama,? said Mark Katz, a veteran Democratic humor writer. ?I think he?s smart, he?s funny, he?s self-aware. To me, it doesn?t sound like his voice. To me, he looks like a guy having a great time reading the really funny jokes his staff put together, but I just don?t hear his voice. I just don?t.?
Obama generally eschews the kind of deadly self-directed stinger George W. Bush delivered at his first Gridiron Club dinner in 2001, when he allowed: ?Those stories about my intellectual capacity do get under my skin. You know for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, ?Intelligence Briefing.?? And near the end of his tenure, Bush said he was considering ?something really fun and creative? for his memoirs, ?You know, maybe a pop-up book.?
Secretary of State John Kerry is often regarded as a stiff?s stiff, but he won the room at this year?s Gridiron by mocking his and his wife?s wealth, saying he felt at home in white tie and tails: ?Or, as we call it at our house, workout gear. Or, as we call it at our other house, pajamas. ? Or, as we call it at our other house, swimming costumes.?
John F. Kennedy retired the self-deprecation title more than half a century ago, when he was gearing up to run for president in 1958. At that year?s Gridiron dinner, he forever inoculated himself from charges that he was coasting to election on his family fortune, reading a mock telegram from his father: ?Dear Jack: Don?t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I?ll be damned if I?m going to pay for a landslide.?
?To me, that?s the Rosetta Stone of political humor,? Katz said. ?You imagine anyone else in the room saying that joke, it would have been devastating. He got there first, and he owned it, and no one could touch him.?
(Also on POLITICO: White House Correspondents? Dinner weekend party list 2014)
Obama?s former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, insisted that this president ?very much understands that you don?t get very far purely by destroying the other side.?
Yet when asked for examples of Obama?s best self-deprecating lines, Favreau struggled a bit for an answer, eventually citing jokes about big ears and bad poll numbers. ?In the early years,? Favreau added, ?he joked about the image of him as a Messiah, and he joked about his birth certificate.? (At the Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York in 2008, Obama declared, ?Contrary to the rumors you?ve heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton ??)
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/barack-obama-106261.html#ixzz30qVqh0gP
