The Humor Deficit

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 17, 2008 9:46 AM

Barack Obama has committed the unpardonable sin of not giving us anything to laugh at.

I mean, what's with that guy? How dare he not serve as an object of our amusement?

Apparently, comics are treading lightly when it comes to St. Barack. There's a bit of racial sensitivity, for one thing. And the senator is not an easy target. He's eloquent, knows how to spell potato, doesn't toss around such phrases as "dead or alive" and is a strong family man. What exactly do you make fun of?

I've seen Obama get off a good crack or two. Remember when he said about our first black president at a January debate: "I'd have to investigate more Bill's dancing abilities before I actually judged whether in fact he was a brother."

But the point isn't whether Obama has a sense of humor. It's whether he's too perfect to serve as a punch line. And that would clearly be a disqualification for president.

The question got jump-started by this Bill Carter piece in the NYT, which noted that the late-night comics always rag on John McCain as having one foot in the nursing home, but:

"There has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race." Mike Barry, a Letterman writer, says the problem is that Obama is "not buffoonish in any way."

When a Jon Stewart joke about Obama flipping on campaign finance fell flat, the "Daily Show" host told the audience: "You know, you're allowed to laugh at him."

Comedians don't develop a "take" on someone overnight. Dana Carvey didn't nail Bush 41 on his first day in office; wouldn't be prudent. Bill Clinton was pegged early as a womanizer, but it wasn't until he was in office for a year that everyone and his brother started doing the lip-biting, raspy-voiced imitation.

Is there hope for Obama? Maureen Dowd says unfunny is a liability:

"At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he's trying so hard to be perfect that it's stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?

"Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious.

"But he does not want the 'take' on him to become that he's so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can't even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don't mess with our messiah!

"If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can't make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor."

At the New Republic, Noam Scheiber says we shouldn't need permission to chortle at the Illinois senator:

"The problem for Obama is that people tend to vote for a presidential candidate they feel personally comfortable with. If people aren't comfortable with humor about Obama--if they're reluctant to laugh at him for fear of being thought racist, or of crossing some line of political correctness--then some of them probably aren't comfortable with him, period.

"Granted, the returns to being made fun of diminish pretty quickly. You never want to turn into a Kerry- or Gore-style object of derision, to say nothing of Gerald Ford or Dan Quayle. So there are real advantages to having a comedy force field.

"But the campaign faces a tricky balancing act, if nothing else. On the one hand, they have to be pretty vigilant against smears that are genuinely scurrilous or racist. On the other, they have to avoid the impression that Obama is somehow above ridicule, which is a status no president will ever enjoy (nor should they)."

But Betsy's Page believes there's no shortage of material:

"Heck, Newsweek's regular cover stories about how deep and wonderful Obama is with the obligatory Obama-looking-thoughtful-picture should be a regular running gag on any comedy show.

"You know, comics often say things to make their audience a bit uncomfortable by going slightly over the line in what they say or do. So these comedians should welcome a chance to make a joke that their audience isn't expecting. After a while, the Bush and Clinton jokes get pretty stale. We've been hearing all the variants on Bush is dumb and Clinton is horny jokes for years now. And the McCain is old jokes are really lame. There is no originality or wit in these jokes anymore. Get something new.

"But if these writers can't find anything to laugh at about Obama, they should spend a little time on some of the better conservative sites. They'll find plenty of openings for jokes about Obama. Here are just a few takes that they could make off the top of my head. He's arrogant; he's inexperienced; he's pandering and flip-flopping; he blames his staff whenever something goes wrong or is misunderstood; and he has been throwing people under the bus at a wicked pace."

Yeah, but even if true, inexperience and flip-flopping aren't exactly thigh-slappers.

Speaking of humor--or lame attempts at such--is there a statute of limitations on offensive jokes?

An Arizona blog called Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, run by a former vice chairman of the state's Democratic Party, unearthed a 1986 article in the Tucson Citizen in which McCain was reported to have said the following:

"Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, 'Where is that marvelous ape?' "

Now it's spreading across the Net, including the Hotline. HuffPost's Sam Stein tracked down the reporter of the 1986 story, Norma Coile:

" 'I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said. Enough women repeated it to me at the time and the McCain campaign had a non-denial denial,' said Coile, now with the Arizona Daily Star. 'It came after his "Seizure World" joke, in which he referred to the [retirement community] Leisure World as Seizure World.' "

Americablog's John Aravosis chimes in: "Hey, it was a youthful indiscretion. I mean, McCain was only 49 years old at the time."

A bad joke may be just a bad joke, but McCain does have a history of making offensive cracks. So far, at least, the MSM have stayed away from the story. (Today, of course, it would instantly be on YouTube.) Would that be the case if Obama was reported to have made a similar crack?

Following up on yesterday's scooplet in this space--that Katie, Brian and Charlie are going on Barack's Excellent Adventure abroad--I get some reaction for the print version:

"Obama has 'proven adept at generating excitement,' says David Folkenflik, media correspondent for National Public Radio. He said the anchors hope 'a little bit of that excitement will rub off on their newscasts if they can convey an American phenomenon abroad, if that's what it turns out to be. Senator McCain is not as magnetic a figure in that way.'

"Jim Geraghty, a columnist for National Review Online, said Obama's paucity of foreign travel as a presidential candidate makes the trip a natural draw for news organizations, while 'McCain has been around forever, and he's probably been to all these places before.' But, he says, 'the networks will be acting as a PR wing for the Obama campaign if they treat any of these photo ops as truly newsworthy breakthroughs.' "

Time calls it "an audition on the world stage."

Atlantic's Marc Ambinder ponders the challenge for Mac:

"It's hard to imagine that the McCain campaign won't be watching every single statement uttered by Obama very closely. But what should they do? A frontal attack on Obama's experience while he's in harm's way would strike many as tasteless, but not providing a response would be political malpractice. Alternatively, Britain is not a war zone. It's easier to rebut Obama when he's visiting the Queen than when he's visiting American troops.

"One Republican strategist suggests that the campaign leave the tough stuff to third parties. If Obama makes a gaffe, gin up the Matt Drudge outrage engine and get the Republican blogs riled up and frothy.

"Or McCain could use the week to drill down on economic policy; he'll have the whole country to himself.

"Getting the media to cover John McCain in equal proportion to Obama will be tough, and the McCain folks know this."

Been wondering what else Jesse Jackson said when Fox microphones picked him up insulting Obama? Now we know:

"Jesse Jackson apparently was caught on tape using the n-word, the racial epithet he has railed against for years, adding an ironic new twist to the controversy over his recent remarks about Barack Obama during an off-air break in a televised interview," says the Chicago Tribune. Apparently Hymietown wasn't an aberration.

How's this for taking a hit?

"Mitt Romney, whose prospects of becoming John McCain's running mate appear on the rise, is preparing to formally declare he will not seek donations to repay $45 million in personal loans he made to his failed presidential bid - the biggest ever made by a candidate in a primary campaign," the Boston Globe reports.

Arianna (who now describes herself as a Democrat) says the media are misconstruing her motivations:

"In the last two weeks, there has been a flurry of stories, both in the traditional press and in the blogosphere, that has tried to portray criticism of Barack Obama's recent stands as the sole province of disenchanted members of 'the left' -- also referred to as 'the far left' (New York Times), 'left-winger bloggers' (also New York Times), 'the liberal blogosphere' (USA Today, Christian Science Monitor), and 'left-wing supporters' (The Telegraph).

"And many of these stories have cited me, using the two posts I wrote urging Obama not to water down his brand and tack to the middle in an attempt to attract undecided swing voters as examples of the 'fire from the left.' . . .

"I am not 'angry' or 'outraged' or 'howling that Mr. Obama is selling out the left.' And his 'policy switches' haven't given me 'whiplash.' I am not offended that he isn't marching in lockstep with progressives. I'd be worried if he was marching in lockstep with anyone. Other than himself. And that is the point I was trying to make.

"My problem isn't that Barack Obama doesn't always agree with me. My problem is that Barack Obama has started to not always agree with himself -- falling prey instead to the Conventional Wisdom sirens."

Elsewhere on the flip-flop watch, Time's Ana Marie Cox takes on the Talk of the Town:

"In this week's New Yorker, if you can make it past the cover, Rick Hertzberg articulates a line of thinking I've heard from (among others) my husband:

" Obama, it turns out, is a politician. In this respect, he resembles the forty-three Presidents he hopes to succeed, from the Father of His Country to the wayward son, Alpha George to Omega George. Winning a presidential election doesn't require being all things to all of the people all of the time, but it does require being some things to most of the people some of the time. It doesn't require saying one thing and also saying its opposite, but it does require saying more or less the same thing in ways that are understood in different ways . . .

" It was inevitable that the boggier reaches of the blogosphere would eventually smell betrayal. In contrast, what bloggers call the MSM--the mainstream media--seldom trades in the currency of moral indignation. Although the better newspapers have regular features devoted to evaluating the candidates' proposals for workability, the MSM generally eschews value judgments about the merits. The MSM--especially the cable-news intravenous drip--prefers flip-flops.

"In other words: Don't you want to win, you dirty freaking hippie? Except if you're a member of the MSM, in which case, Don't you want to be one of the 'better newspapers'? Oh, and John McCain is worse.

"I'm fine with people defending Obama's flip-flops, but I don't like pretending they don't matter. Especially if it's not just a simple change of some random position, but -- as with FISA -- a real rejection of a significant campaign promise. I'm probably going to vote for Obama, okay; I do not have to like it. I do not have believe that his awesomeness creates amnesia."

An interesting piece on Politico, though I should note that every presidential campaign gets some of this blowback, especially one involving a long shot who wasn't the establishment candidate:

"After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama's presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November. 'They think they know what's right and everyone else is wrong on everything,' groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. 'They are kind of insufferable at this point.' "

Um, they did manage to win the nomination, didn't they?

"Among the grievances described by Democratic leadership insiders:

"· Until a mailing that went out in the past few days, Obama had done little fundraising for Democratic candidates since signing off on e-mailed fundraising appeals for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee immediately after securing the Democratic nomination.

"· Obama has sometimes appeared in members' districts with no advance notice to lawmakers, resulting in lost opportunities for those Democrats to score points by appearing alongside their party's presumptive presidential nominee."

Sounds like some hand-holding is in order.