Obama off limits to late night gag writers?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 15th, 2008

For a pathetic display among late night writers and hosts, check out the International Herald Tribune article, “Want Obama in a punch line? First, find a joke” which says that the reason there are so few Obama jokes on late night shows is that… well… there’s nothing funny about him.

…a fundamental factor is so far missing in Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President George W. Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic persona.

We’ll let that sink in.

In the past, monologists of all stripes have told us over and over that comics must lead. They must find the funny where no one else does. That a good chunk of the comic’s mission is to make folks uncomfortable, make them think, challenge their long-held perceptions. Even in late night monologues. At least on HBO or on The Daily Show.

And, even if you don’t buy that late night hosts are duty bound to speak truth to power, they at least have an obligation to make jokes about the powerful and the pompous.

So far, though, they’re scratching their heads and are totally dumbfounded– Gosh! There’s just nothing funny there! And if there were, well, our audiences wouldn’t want to hear it.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way.”

“It’s almost like: ‘Hey, don’t go after this guy. He’s a fresh face; cut him some slack.'”

“Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh. The audience is not going to allow anyone to do that.”

“People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”

“I think some of us were maybe too quick to caricature Al Gore and John Kerry and there’s maybe some reluctance to do the same thing to him.”

What the hell is going on here? How are a bunch of normally wiseass people suddenly struck dumb (and incapable of making the funny) by a one-term senator from Illinois? All of a sudden, our comedians are turning into Harry Belafonte!

The normally vicious (and often unfunnily so) Bill Maher cites the freedom he has– by virtue of his home on pay cable– to make jokes that other might not be able to. But the only gag he comes up with is a weak bowling joke.

Kimmel at least acknowledges that something’s amiss, (“There’s a weird reverse racism going on. You can’t joke about him because he’s half-white. It’s silly.”) But then he says, “I think it’s more a problem because he’s so polished, he doesn’t seem to have any flaws.” It’s jaw-dropping.

If this isn’t a display of cowardice, it’s at least a major abdication of responsibility.

And it’s all the more puzzling because it’s self-censorship. No one is declaring Obama to be off limits. These writers and monologists are all taking it upon themselves to lay off. And, in the process, they’re letting down their audiences.

The author of the piece, Bill Carter, makes the required attempt to attribute the omission to racism, pointing out that the writers, the hosts and the audiences are nearly all white. But this doesn’t wash. Plenty of public figures who are black are lampooned all the time.

The Male Half of the Staff (who is hardly a political comic!) currently has a couple of Obama jokes in his act which have been getting a consistently good response. In front of predominantly white audiences. Two weeks ago, however, in front of several crowds which were one-third to half black, the jokes received a thunderous response. So audiences, both black and white, are more than willing to laugh when Obama is skewered– even when the joke turns on his race,

We theorize that timidity, borne of a toxic and crippling mix of political correctness, guilt and condescension is causing this late night paralysis. What the oft-ridiculed W. might call “the soft bigotry of low comedy expectations.”

The late night hosts and their staffs are engaged in a bizarre and public effort to avoid joking about a public figure. (A public figure who might soon become the most powerful person on the planet.) And we get the uneasy feeling that they’re are not so much incapable of making jokes about Obama as they are unwilling. (Basically, what they’re offering as reasons for their failure are merely excuses, excuses offered with a straight, solemn face.) Has anything this absurd and pitiful ever happened before?

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