Barack Obama added to his comedy resume this week with a sterling performance on Zack Galifianakis’ showcase of non sequiturs, “Between Two Ferns.” After a couple of minutes of banter, including Obama insulting Galifianakis’ “Hungover Part 3,” he lays out the case for signing up for healthcare in the format that millions would — and have — listened to.
Because everything Obama does is subject of outrage to the right wing, Bill O’Reilly has jumped in to criticize, saying Lincoln would have never done such a thing. O’Reilly considers himself something of a Lincoln expert, having put his name on a best selling book largely written by another. And there is truth in what he says here. There were no video podcasts in the 19th century. But, as Jeff Greenfield has pointed out, Lincoln was criticized in his day for telling jokes, some of them off color.
As often happens when Fox complains about everything, some mainstream reporter will pose an actual question about it. This happened when Jim Avilia of ABC News took some time in the daily White House Press briefing to ask Jay Carney whether this tarnished “the dignity of the office.”
Doesn’t the Easter Egg roll, greeting basketball teams or pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey do the same thing?
As a stab of Presidential comedy, it beat George W . Bush’s slide show looking through the White House for the missing weapons of mass destruction for the 2004 Correspondents Dinner that was in poor taste. More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in his folly of finding such weapons in Iraq.
Most instances of humor by Presidents occur while they are candidates. Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me?” on “Laugh-In.” Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin were all on “Saturday Night Live,” which John McCain once hosted (did it harm, I wonder, the dignity of the Senate?).
Obama was the first sitting President to also sit on a late night show — on Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show. He also jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon. But to be part of one of the funniest shows around, full of awkward pauses, reactions to non sequitirs and lobbing his own insults at the host and holding his own is quite an accomplishment. It shows strength at a time when some (at Fox again) are eager to detect weakness.
But it’s also a very smart move of the White House. Drawing 7.1 views its first day brings its urgent message — sign up for Affordable Health Act by March 31 — to the key younger audience it is seeking. It’s like speaking Spanish to the Latino audience; appearing on top-notch comedy is the way to reach young people or, as Avila put it at the briefing “these people who don’t watch us at 6:30, or don’t watch this briefing.”
Click on the video and it takes you directly to Healthcare.gov. Tuesday it helped increase traffic there by 40 percent. Mission accomplished, as Bush once said.