May We Mock, Barack
Maureen Dowd
When I interviewed Jon
Stewart and Stephen Colbert for Rolling Stone a couple years ago, I
wondered what Barack Obama would mean for them.
“It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys,†I said.
“Are you kidding me?†Stewart scoffed.
Then he and Colbert both said at the same time: “His dad was a goat-herder!â€
When I noted that Obama, in his memoir, had revealed that he had done
some pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,†the two comedians began
riffing about the dapper senator’s familiarity with drug slang.
Colbert: Wow, that’s a very street way of putting it. ‘A little blow.’
Stewart: A little bit of the white rabbit.
Colbert: ‘Yeah, I packed a cocktail straw of cocaine and had a prostitute blow it in my ear, but that is all I did. High-fivin.’ ’
Flash forward to the kerfuffle — and Obama’s icy reaction — over this week’s New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.
“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of
virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor, too?â€
wrote James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times, suggesting “an irony
deficiency†in Obama and his fans.
Many of the late-night comics
and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York
Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing
“buffoonish†about Obama — and because many in their audiences are
intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not
been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and
Kerry.
“There’s a weird reverse racism going on,†Jimmy Kimmel said.
Carter also observed that there’s no easy comedic “take†on Obama,
“like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s
goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic personality.â€
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.
On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that
subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find
jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including
this:
“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse,
and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman
says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies,
‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans
that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ â€
John
McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little
jerk†— can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased
harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly
earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he
needs to be.
He’s already in danger of seeming too prissy about
food — a perception heightened when The Wall Street Journal reported
that the planners for Obama’s convention have hired the first-ever
Director of Greening, the environmental activist Andrea Robinson. She
in turn hired an Official Carbon Adviser to “measure the greenhouse-gas
emissions of every placard, every plane trip, every appetizer prepared
and every coffee cup tossed.â€
The “lean ‘n’ green†catering
guidelines, The Journal said, bar fried food and instruct that, “on the
theory that nutritious food is more vibrant, each meal should include
‘at least three of the following colors: red, green, yellow,
blue/purple, and white.’ (Garnishes don’t count.) At least 70% of the
ingredients should be organic or grown locally, to minimize emissions
from fuel during transportation.â€
Bring it on, Ozone
Democrats! Because if Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny
about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the
rest of us.
Last edited: 16-Jul-08 01:40 PM