"May We Mock Barack?"

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 17th, 2008

It’s the title of Maureen Dowd’s NYT column from yesterday. She writes:

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!”

What a difference a couple years makes.

Howard Kurtz, Washington Post staffer and host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, wrote in today’s WaPo about “The Humor Deficit”. It’s a good survey of opinion from the MSM and the blogosphere, offering quotes from, among others, Dowd, The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, and, of course, Bill Carter whose piece kicked off the controversy in the first place (and which set us off Monday night).

Says Scheiber, “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).”

Kurtz also quotes from Betsy Newmark, a history and government teacher, blogging from Raleigh, NC:

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.

The history teacher gets it.

The Carter piece seems to have touched off a firestorm among pundits and media analysts. No doubt the Obama campaign is formulating a strategy to cast their candidate in a humorous light to counteract the emerging image of jokeproofedness that forming on the horizon. Or not… They just might figure that, since Obama represents a “different kind of politician,” perhaps he’ll also be the first president in history that no one is allowed to joke about.

Dowd foreshadows that chilling future nicely:

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.

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