What's so funny about Barack Obama?

NOT FUNNY: On the night after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Lenny Bruce was apparently appearing in a New York nightclub, and decided to see if it was too soon to get comic traction out of the event. After delivering a gag whose details are unfortunately lost to history, he paused to take in the stony silence, then told the audience “Vaughn Meader is screwed!”

I hadn’t thought about Vaughn Meader for years until I read a Washington Post column last week by Eugene Robinson, where the writer commented on Don Rickle’s recent appearance on David Letterman that featured a similar stony silence in response to Rickle’s shot at president-elect Barack Obama, a halting but not particularly vicious gag involving world crises and basketball that prompted an awkwardness you could practically see seeping out of the TV screen.

Robinson noted what’s been obvious for months now – that there hasn’t been a lot of humour directed at Obama, and none that has a fraction of the acid directed at everyone from John McCain and Sarah Palin to Obama’s running-mate, Joe Biden. Robinson takes the optimistic line, that Americans are still making the “cultural attitude adjustments” necessary to absorbing the idea of an African-American president, and treating him with the same lack of deference as every other White House resident in history.

“Eventually, some comic will come up with a spot-on Obama impression, the way Vaughn Meader did with JFK,” Robinson writes. “Eventually, audiences will revert to irreverence.” Meader became a superstar with The First Family, a comedy album featuring his eerie JFK mimicry, but fell into obscurity overnight after his death, shunned as a reminder of the time when the nation could be irreverent with Kennedy.

Right now, Obama is revered but unknown, a symbol more than a man, and Robinson thinks it’s a pity. He doesn’t think Rickles was being racist – Obama’s love of basketball is well-known, but right now audiences are quick to take preemptive offense.

“To the extent that the Obama family's tastes or habits seem in any way distinctive,” he writes, “they will have to be seen as the Obama family's specific tastes and habits -- attributable not to a group but to a set of individuals. The idea that ‘all black people’ are like this or like that has always been absurd, and this absurdity becomes inescapable when a black person occupies the singular position of head of state.” I’d like to hope he’s right, because if he’s not, it’s going to be a dull and dismal four years.