gracchusdixit

Several days ago, a friend asked me a question that at first seemed absurd.  Why, he asked, are there no Obama jokes?  I thought he was kidding—at least until I thought about it a moment or two longer and realized that he was right.  Apart from the occasional shot by the irrepressible likes of David Letterman or Jon Stewart, our current president is conspicuously joke-free.

Most of our past Presidents, on the other hand, have provided us with a gold mine of personal and political humor.  George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, even Richard Nixon—every single one of them spawned enough satirical, knee-slapping wise-cracks to fill volumes.  There was Bush’s limitless ability to mangle the English language.  There was Clinton’s fondness for Big Mac’s, not to mention pretty young things in the White House.  There were Reagan’s lapses of memory, Ford’s pratfalls on the podium, and Nixon’s sweaty four o’clock shadow.

But not Barack Obama.  He, almost alone among the Presidents we can still remember, seems to elude humor.  Why?

My friend suggested that “political correctness” may have something to do with it.  It would be unseemly and tasteless to ridicule the first African-American President in our history.  That undoubtedly has something to do with it, but it doesn’t seem to be a sufficient explanation.

Another possibility is that we live in fairly grim times—an economy that’s on its knees, a level of unemployment that won’t budge, a level of public debt that seems likely to beggar our children and our grandchildren.  Perhaps the times are simply too serious to allow for much humor.  But that didn’t stop the jokesters from ridiculing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor, and their Scottish terrier Fala during the darkest days of the Great Depression.

No, there must be another reason.   I think the reason may be the man himself.

The people we laugh at are much like us.  No matter how high and mighty they may be, they have feet of clay.  They have all the human imperfections that ordinary people have.  So, when we laugh at them, we also laugh at some part of ourselves.  As Oscar Wilde quipped:  “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”   We want our Presidents to be “looking at the stars,” but it comforts and amuses us to learn that they, like the rest of us, are also standing in the gutter.

This is not the case with our current President.  The closest thing we have to an enduring Obama joke is the alliterative phrase, “No Drama Obama.”  But that’s not a joke at all.  It’s a description of the man’s demeanor and temperament.  The President is cool and aloof and above it all.  He abhors “drama,” because drama and its mirror image, comedy, are the stuff of ordinary life.  They are the things that stir ordinary people.

We may admire Barack Obama.  We may sometimes be inspired by him.  But we will never feel close enough, or comfortable enough, to laugh at him.  That may be one reason his presidency, having begun with such high hopes, is foundering on the rocks.