A joke at Obama's expense on late night TV!
JIMMY FALLON: Everybody's talking about the big health speech last night. Did you guys watch the health speech? In the speech, President Obama said that he will not sign a health care plan that adds one dime to the federal deficit. And then he interrupted himself and said, 'You lie.'
Fallon followed that with a Biden joke. Those aren't nearly as rare as Obama jokes. (Has Letterman done an Obama joke yet? I don't know.)
FALLON: The president says that he wants to bring affordable health care insurance to every American. Joe Biden got really excited. He thought he was finally going to meet the GEICO Gecko.
Later in the show, an "audience member" calls out Jimmy Fallon for lying.
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Read a positively lame essay written by TIME's Richard Zoglin, "Comedy in the Obama Age: The Joking Gets Hard."
No.
It only gets hard if the comedian allows his/her personal politics or an Obama crush to stifle the laughs.
Making jokes about Barack Obama is the big test for political comedians these days....
The votes had barely been counted last November when the pundits started expressing anxiety. No, not just about whether the new President could right the economy or reform health care. The burning question for the Obama age: What the heck were political comedians going to do? For eight years they had enjoyed a comedic gift from the gods in George W. Bush, whose bumbling presidency provided even richer material than the cartoonish excesses of the Clinton years. But Obama, with his obvious smarts, low-key style and (most important) ability to catch the prevailing tone of irony and laugh at himself, has left the comics with little to hang their punch lines on.
Good grief. That's ridiculous.
Later in the piece, Zoglin quotes comedian Lewis Black.
Even Lewis Black, the quivering maestro of political outrage, strains to put an edge on his obvious admiration for the President.... Talking after a recent set at New York's Gotham Comedy Club, Black admits that Obama is difficult to make fun of but insists he's had no trouble finding political material. "For me, it was never Bush. It was the social issues. Just because Bush left office, that doesn't mean stupidity has fled the country."
There is no lack of material when it comes to Obama.
Some comedians have just decided to be political hacks rather than tap into all the humorous possibilities of Obama.
Zoglin ends with a predictably Leftist shot at President Bush, while in full swoon over Obama.
The Bush presidency, it turns out, may have had a more lasting impact than comedians appreciate. As it opened up a bitter divide in the country, it forced stand-up comedians to take notice — and take sides. Even with a President who's no longer a ready-made joke, for comedians, there's no going back.
Note to Zoglin and the comedians too stubborn or too stupid to go for laughs: EVERY PRESIDENT IS A READY-MADE JOKE.
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