Obama's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious*

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 4th, 2008

We’re fairly sure that Will Durst is being facetious in this quote from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Comedy, which has been a major subplot of the ’08 campaign, could come in for its own share of restructuring on Wednesday.

“My career’s over,” moans stand-up comic Will Durst, in mock lament for a likely Republican defeat. “For those of us who had to go cold turkey on a lame-duck George Bush, Sarah Palin was like a dose of methadone. Now what? This time next year, I’ll be standing behind some counter asking if you want a lid on that coffee or not.”

Fellow stand-up comedian Nato Green says the Bush years “have made it easy to be lazy– anyone could recycle a redneck joke and get a laugh.” If Obama is elected, he continues, “it’s going to impose more market discipline on comics who want to bring forward a point of view and perspective. Some people think it will be hard to make fun of Obama because he’s black. I think it’s because he’s relatively lucid.”

Harder to make fun of Obama because he’s black? Maybe in San Francisco, where political correctness acts like a thousand border collies, keeping the comics from mocking anyone on the “protected” list.

So much for Obama being a “transformational figure!”

We’re once again stunned by the spectacle of comedians who claim to be incapable of joking about a public figure (the man who may be POTUS, in this case!) because he’s (pick one): flawless, black or “lucid” !?

And we’re mystified as to why “market discipline” didn’t kick in sometime around 2002 and force comedians to dream up another angle on George W. Bush other than he’s stupid and tongue-tied. (And, conversely, we’re unclear as to why the market discipline is arbitrarily kicking in now.)

Read our interview with Durst in the October 2001 issue of SHECKYmagazine.com here.

*Atoning for educability through delicate beauty
(Definition, according to Wikipedia)