First of all, I watched “Blade II” the other night as part of a Guillermo Del Toro marathon, and I think that, if this country subsidized Wesley Snipes rather than taxing him, we would probably have enough Wesley Snipes to take care this shit in Iraq.

As for Barack not being funny, if you try to make him look dumb, that’s racist. If you try to make him look horny, that’s racist.  And if you try to make him look shallow or facile or hypocritical, you enrage the millions of devoted Barackers.

Trying to make Barack Obama jokes in front of an audience of Barack Obama supporters is like trying to make jokes at the offense of Jesus at the Southern Baptist Convention.

Okay, so Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and Jesus walk into a whorehouse…

The op-ed piece seems to have disappeared from the Internet.

Jesus saves. The rest of you take damage.

Jesus saves! Gretzky gets the puck. He shoots! HE SCORES!

Since becoming an object of mockery and derision is a good way to lose an election, protecting yourself from becoming such an object of ridicule sounds like a good way to win.

It’s all well and good that the National Association of Comedians and Humor Writers probably feels it’s in their best interest to elect McCain, but it’s no skin off my nose that they will have a harder time doing their job if Obama is elected.

Mitchforth, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but humor generally works by finding something something that is already funny.  You don’t have to make farts seem stinky or loud, they already are.  Thus naturally funny.  You don’t have to make something seem like a pun - either it’s a pun or it’s not, and if it’s not nobody will think it’s funny no matter how you tart it up (though I realize some people don’t find any puns funny at all, and that’s OK too). 

People laugh at jokes about Dubya’s stupidity and/or mendacity because they’re true, or at least perceived as true almost as a rule within the entire world population.  People laugh at jokes about Teh Clenis because Clinton is famous for being a womanizer.  Not because the comedians were all so gifted at making an otherwise intelligent and honest man “seem” like an idiot or a liar and make an otherwise chaste man “seem” like a lech.  It’s funny because it’s true. 

Any comedian who tries to make Obama “seem” stupid or oversexed isn’t going to work, because that’s like trying to make hitting a B flat on a piano “seem” like a fart.  It’s just not.  I’m sure there are other things about Obama that we will have plenty of chances to joke about.  But the main reason the MSM jokesters have failed at mocking Obama is because they’re too lazy to do anything but repeat the tried and true political jokes of the last 15 years: womanizing/horniness in the case of Clinton, and stupidity/corruption in the case of Bush. 

There’s a part of me that genuinely thinks that certain sectors of the talking head jokesters were rooting for Hillary largely because it would mean a 4-to-8 year vacation for them—just queue up all the old columns about Bill, add some facile stuff about Teh Humorless Feminists/Libruls, and head off for Tahiti for the next half decade, at least.

“Some things aren’t funny, like the guy wearing “Dick in a Box” costume last Halloween. “

This is true, unless the box contained a picture of Dick Cheney. Then it was kinda funny.

One of the funniest thing about Hillary Clinton was the story she told about running from sniper fire in Bosnia. I mean, that was weird but also funny after the fact. Obama doesn’t have that many obviously funny things about him, but I’m not sure that I want a Presidential laughingstock. We’ve sort of done that and bought the t-shirt already.

Maureen Dowd’s idea that a funny President will make people feel better in bad times is sort of silly. Look at George W. Bush. The guy is a laugh a minute. Everything that comes out of his mouth is hilarious. But I don’t think that his choking on pretzels and wiping out on his bike has done a lot for the economy or America’s place in the world.

It’s sort of odd that humor is what the media wants in the leader of the free world. I mean, you would think that someone semi intelligent would be a good entry level criteria…

One of the funniest thing about Hillary Clinton was the story she told about running from sniper fire in Bosnia.

You thought that was funny?  I just thought it was kind of pathetic. 

The main thing I thought was genuinely funny about the possibility of a Hillary Clinton candidacy/presidency was the ample opportunities to compare her to Tracy Flick.  A character who was, in fact, hilarious because everyone knows someone exactly like that.  The ultimate straight (wo)man.

The fact that there hasn’t been any Barack-Urkel jokes (my god people, Family Matters was set in Chicago even!) just shows you that the media can’t even pick the low hanging fruit.

Well, I’m Canandian, so entertaining politicians are not really the norm. Or at least they weren’t when I was growing up. You kind of expected serious, older, stodgy, reliable people to run the country. I think our general model was sort of the Queen of England, not Ronald Reagan.

Except for the Trudeaus, of course. I don’t remember the reign of P.E.T. and Maggie very well, but I recall him giving the finger to Western Canada for some reason. And I recently read a story about Margaret Trudeau sitting in Roy Cohn’s birthday cake (by accident).

It’s great when the media can find a warm and fuzzy connection to a candidate. But trying to find cute lovable things about Obama and then resenting him for it when you can’t do so is pretty lame. There is frankly nothing funny about McCain. At least with Obama, you can make jokes about how often he goes to the gym…

“You thought that was funny?  I just thought it was kind of pathetic”

Well, I thought it was pretty funny when she repeated it on Jay Leno or something as an excuse for why she was late. And then Bush picked up on it at his annual Correspondents’ Dinner. He said that Clinton couldn’t make it because she was dodging sniper-fire, and Obama couldn’t make it because he was at Church.

Hee hee… the brouhaha over that Reverend guy who said “God damn America” was a little bit funny in retrospect. I thought he looked so cute and mild-mannered.

JFK, who had levels of charisma and public admiration similar to Obama, had some good jokes made about him by Vaughn Meader. I forget all of the skits, but one of them involves Kennedy stopping at a gas station with his motorcade in tow, asking the attendant if he took coupons, and driving on when the attendant said no. Another has Jackie Kennedy bumbling through the White House tour while maintaining an exaggerated upper-crust accent.

SNL’s General Petraeus Hearings skit had a few good jokes about the “cult of Obama.” My personal favorite moment being when Sen. Levin invites Barack Obama to the committee to ask questions of Gen. Petraeus. Sens. Clinton and McCain complain to Sen. Levin that Obama has no business being there since he’s not on the committee, and Levin apologetically replies, “Listen, the guy’s gonna be the next president…. no offense.”

Dude, there are a ton of funny things about John McCain. He looks like a human/squirrel hybrid. He’s married to a Barbie heiress who looks like she’s been dipped in shellac. He has no idea that he can be recorded: he thinks he can say different things to different groups and get away with it all the way to November. He’s the man who wants you off his lawn.

Your right, Barack is not funny. But I think it’s his lack of substance that makes it so.

“Hence why nobody ever told a Dan Quayle joke.”

Your mixing metaphors. I meant soul, substance. Although you’re right that there are similarities between the two.

That should have been “you’re mixing metaphors” conceptually, that is.

I boldly predict that, at some point, our media will find something funny about Obama.  Might take 6 or 7 years, but they’ll come up with a funny joke.

Jon Stewart can do it.

Ah; that’s where it went. I have a quote for this situation:

Comedy possesses a very strong anti-establishment tradition of mocking those perceived to be in power. There’s something unseemly to most people, for instance, in mocking the poor simply because they’re poor. In comedy, women are more likely to triumph over men, children over adults, employees over bosses, mice over cats, and so on. There’s a long tradition in many cultures for some sort of “lord of misrule” that allows for the release of social tensions. In contrast, the minstrel performer reverses this comedic tradition and mocks those not in power.

Given how blindingly simple this is, I’m amazed that people still can’t tell minstrelsy from comedy.

Okay, I found some funny stuff that Obama has said. The Cheney quip is just smart thinking, but still amusing:

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/barackobama/a/obama-quotes.htm

“Now that’s my phone buzzing there. I don’t want you to think I’m getting fresh or anything.”—posing for a picture with supporters in Indiana, when he apparently felt his phone start to vibrate in his pocket, against which one woman was closely pressed.”

“I don’t want to be invited to the family hunting party.”—on revelations that he and Dick Cheney are eighth cousins (Watch video clip)

“It’s like I was shot out of a cannon. I’m so overexposed that I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse.”

On the controversial Ukraine election: “Well, President Bush said he wanted to export American-style democracy and, by God, I think it’s working.”

“How can you mix a metaphor when one wasn’t made?”

I was meant to be flip, the commenter mixed two figurative cliches, a live and a dead, and got an inconsistent comparison.

But if I have to explain, it was too convoluted to be funny in the first place so I’ll take it back.

But I still say it’s hard for an empty suit to be funny. Nothing to grab onto. One can joke about his arrogance, and Krauthammer does a good job here: tinyurl.com/5cr2bp but once you’ve covered that, it’s pretty much over.

Yeah I think a big part of the problem (i.e., why the media can’t think of funny things to say about him) is that he’s actually a pretty reasonable, self-aware, humble smart guy with a really witty and self-depricating sense of humor…. he basically got there first, and did it better. It’s hard to make fun of Barack Obama, because Barack Obama is funny.

I remember WAAAY back before the whole Hillary v. Clinton showdown got nasty, this Obama quote literally made me Laugh Out Loud:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/21/obama-is-bill-clinton-really-a-brother-id-have-to-see-him-dance/

CNN’s Joe Johns asked Barack Obama whether he thought former President Bill Clinton was the nation’s ‘first black president,’ an observation famously coined by black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

“Bill Clinton did have an enormous affinity with the African-American community, and still does, and I think that’s well-earned,” said Obama, “I would have to investigate more Bill’s dancing abilities, you know, some of this other stuff before I accurately judged whether he was in fact a ‘brother,’” joked the Illinois senator.

I think the funniest thing about Obama are the people who plan on voting for him.  They’re voting for a vague promise that he’ll change something, how, who knows.  He’s like the prize in a Cracker Jack box, you know it’s in there, you just don’t know what it is until you open the box.  That whole we should feed our children breakfast speech must have been the clencher for the Obamites.

“I think the funniest thing about Obama are the people who plan on voting for him.  They’re voting for a vague promise that he’ll change something, how, who knows.”

Yes, and the alternative is voting for a mother-fucker who will spend the next decade’s worth of health care and education funding on bombing Iran into the stone age, and who will return us to the late nineteenth century concerning women’s reproductive rights.

God forbid, don’t let the idea of a productive uncertainty lead you to vote for Obama! Let’s go with the surefire loser!

Perhaps me in gold country is trying to say that comparing Dan Quale and Barack Obama is comparing a Clockwork Orange and an Eggplant.

//if you don’t know if you’ve found the funny, you proably havent. eh.

Jason likes the certainty of knowing that his Cracker Jack box is definitely filled with dogshit.