According to the New York Times, Barack Obama is not funny:
“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.
Jokes have been made about what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton really thought about Mr. Obama during the primaries, and about the vulgar comments the Rev. Jesse Jackson made about him last week. But anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat.
When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”
But it’s an incontrovertible law of comedy: all politicians are funny. This is less about Obama himself, and his alleged deficit of buffoonish qualities, and more about the social and political conditions surrounding his candidacy right now.
Democrats are so shell-shocked from the past 8 years, and so amazed that they actually stand a decent chance of winning, many are basically holding their breath until the election’s over. They’re unwilling to laugh until it’s safe to laugh. (After all, they won’t even laugh at mockery of false rumors about Obama.) It’s something of an irony that George W. Bush has actually rendered large swaths of the Democratic electorate humorless.
Meanwhile, thanks to his color, his youth, his political talent, and the political moment, Obama is carrying tons of symbolic freight. Also not funny.
Finally, Republicans and conservatives tend not to be skilled political humorists. They prefer a bludgeon, not a scalpel. So we won’t be getting much in the way of Obama humor – at least, funny Obama humor – from that quarter.
But conditions change, especially in politics. If Obama is elected, he’ll start making decisions and pissing people off and late night comedians will suddenly discover the single, dumb characteristic that lauched a thousand jokes. We just don’t know what that is yet.
