* Michelle was in Maxim’s 100 Sexiest Women as well as People’s Most Beautiful People list, probably others as well. Even North Korean media can’t be more shamelessly in the bag for the ruling party than that.
* They call Serena Williams “beautiful” and “sexy,” so why not Michelle Obama?
* Sample question from the Federal Ministry of Truth Qualifying Exam for the Humor/Satire Endorsement to the Basic Journalism/Public Speaking License:
Which of the following is unacceptable as the basis for a satirical remark?
(a) Bush I: “Read my lips…”
(b) Clinton: “I did not have sex…”
(c) Bush II: “America is a nation with a mission…”
(d) Obama: “If you like your plan…”
(e) Both (b) and (d).
Answer: (d). Practice note: (b) forms the basis for mocking right-wing obsessions with invading personal privacy to prosecute normal healthy sexual practices, even to launching comically-unjustified impeachment proceedings.
* Reporting from the parochial backwater of the UK I can say that I have never seen Obama ridiculed, satirised or used as the butt of a single joke by any British comedian or comedy vehicle whether as prez or before.
By which I mean anywhere in the MSM. Not online or in some niche publication. I’ve never seen a stand-up mock him any way either.
* The SNL house brand for 40 years has been silliness for the sake of silliness. Lorne Michaels has explained many times that his goal is to hook adolescents who are just old enough to stay up late with their friends for the first time.
So, aiming the show at what 14 year olds think is funny, which isn’t hugely different from what 10 year olds think is funny, is the goal. Thus, Dana Carvey’s impression of the elder Bush was very funny in a silly way and thus is the most famous SNL presidential impression, along with Chevy Chase falling down.
* If Obama is such a funny fellow, one would think that within his two memoirs there would be any number of well known jokes or witticisms.
Yet I can’t recall a single one.
Why might that be?
* The single funniest thing I ever heard a president say was when W was sternly reading off a list of terrorists during a big speech and he stumbled on the name Ramzi Yousef and then said, “Sorry about that, Ramzi.”
* Obama is a self absorbed narcissist. His interpersonal life is centered around engorging himself with narcissistic supply, and just as importantly, protecting himself from narcissistic injury. I.e., his genuine mediocrity becomes exposed.
Obama gets his supply from his countless cheap grace political stunts like fronting for men in dresses to use women’s facilities so his sycophantic lackeys in the MSM mindlessly applaud his “courage”.
Obama’s “humor” such as it is, is almost entirely a deprecating form of crude narcissistic self-defense. I.e., he glibly attacks those who are not sufficiently deferential to the “smartest person in the room”. So his “humorous” comments equating Vladimir Putin to a bored schoolboy. Putin does not suck up to Obama, so Obama the narcissist hates him for it.
BTW, narcissistic avoidance is why Obama consciously ignores the hard issues like the imploding Obamacare. No supply and plenty of potential injury…
President Obama’s attributes have been inexhaustibly detailed by both his admirers and detractors. Not much, however, is much said about his sense of humor. The reason is painfully obvious: there is little humor in the man to detect. In this regard he bears resemblance to Jimmy Carter, the grim, parson-scold who lectured the nation about malaise in the 1970s. The humor that does emanate from the President is usually in the form of ridicule laced with sarcasm, humor at its meanest and nastiest. One is hard pressed to find anything funny or witty in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. The reader takes away from these pages a picture of an angry, alienated young man immersed in self-pity and resentment.
This absence of such a fundamental human quality one might suppose derives from at least three of Barack Obama’s qualities of personality and character.
First, one cannot help be struck by the extreme vanity of this President and an almost pathological need for self-worship. With such astronomical levels of vanity and conceit come thin skin and hypersensitivity and little room for a large and wonderful source of humor — self-deprecation. Devoid of modesty, he believes himself to be a person of unparalleled wisdom and rectitude – “the One, as he self-proclaimed – a fact that is evidenced by his relentless quest to impose himself, his wisdom, his superiority, pontifically…
Ironically, from the countless speeches he has given over the years with the constant, predictable self-referencing and self-righteous posturing, almost nothing insightful, witty or poignant can be extracted. Nothing he has said is particularly memorable, quotable, enduring, or funny. His teleprompter deliveries with their unintended Bobble Head doll effect in some way or other almost always tend to be about his favorite subject, himself, and how much better we will all be because of him. The one public forum for which he appears to have an aversion is the press conference. In his few forays into this venue it seems that aspects of his wisdom on occasion are questioned by members of the normally docile White House press corps, an impertinence that clearly annoys him.
Second, the absence of humor is a conspicuous mark of a jealous ideologue. An ideologue can neither be contradicted nor questioned, and Obama, as we have come to know, cannot bear to have his wisdom disputed or challenged. But humor, above all, contradicts – humor turns the strong into the weak, the serious into the silly and makes the somber appear ridiculous. Ideologues when stripped of their pretentious facades are fragile and sensitive often wrapped in multiple sheaths of vanity and conceit. Humor is the enemy of the pretentious, and ideologues are a pretentious, arrogant lot given to the constant exaggeration of their moral and cognitive superiority and their unquestioned indispensability to make the lives of the unwashed better. Thus, we observe the personality profile of our Ideologue-President who was given during his first campaign to the promise of such undertakings as “healing the planet,” “changing America and the world” and “slowing the rise of the oceans.” In these grandiose sallies he was generously assisted by the smitten members of the Fourth Estate who proclaimed his divinity — “a sort of god standing above us” and other similar declarations of apotheosis. (Evan Thomas, Newsweek)
Third, humor, particularly in a political context, is a coded way of speaking the truth. Humor exposes the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the powerful, and Obama, sad to say, is a profoundly dishonest man. His 2008 campaign of Hope and Change was a brilliant but deeply cynical ploy calculated to convince the a-political middle road American electorate that the former street organizer, tutored by an America-loathing pastor, was a sincere, wholesome wunderkind who would end the polarized politics of the Bush era. But the post-racial, bi-partisan, transparency campaign pledges were completely feigned. They had never been nor would ever be any part of his governing philosophy. The real Obama emerged after his election with such bi-partisan olive branches as, “if they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun,” and, as he told an audience in a Univision interview in 2010: “were gonna punish out enemies and reward our friends.” Here, succinctly stated is a distillation of Obama’s social instincts and the essence of his political style, very much Latin America-Caudillo, a toxic mix of garish personality cult, punish-the-rich demagoguery and union cronyism. Obama’s politics can be summed up as the “rule of the three Cs” – Coercion, Corruption, Collusion. His 2012 campaign was nothing like the first. Hope and Change succumbed to defamation and demolition.
