Those comics with humor writer's block when it comes to Obama, can take a page from the JibJab folk. Their latest cartoon on the 2008 election manages to find a hook to make fun of Obama's dreamy and repetitive calls for change. Jim Geraghty tries his hand at making an Obama joke.
Barack Obama walks into a bar.
"I'll have a club soda," he says to the bartender. "But it's not because I secretly belong to a religion that forbids the consumption of alcohol, and I think your raised eyebrow in response to my order fueled some misconceptions about me."
Even Maureen Dowd is concerned about the Obama campaign's seeming humorlessness.
But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!
It's such a hoot to see the kerfuffle over the New Yorker cover. They were supposedly satirizing all those yahoos out there who cling to their guns and God while reading Obama is a Muslim emails. But the ones who really bought into it all were all the liberals afraid that some Muslim-hating redneck was going to stroll by some newstand (because we know these e-mail breathing bozos don't actually subscribe to the New Yorker) and see the cover cartoon and slap his mouth-breathing face and say to his wife, "Hey, Mildred! Did you know that that Baracky fellow was a Muslim - just look at this magazine cover!" Let's face it. If you're picking up a copy of the New Yorker to check out the cover, you probably can figure out that the cartoon is a satire just because you know that the New Yorker would never, ever do anything to make the Obamamessiah look bad. As Art Spiegelman told the San Francisco Examiner, this episode has revealed more about the humorless elitism of the left than anything about the right.
But Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former New Yorker staffer, was baffled that much of the negative reaction to the cartoon was coming from Obama supporters on liberal blogs.
"They sound so elitist," Spiegelman told The Chronicle. "The essence of what they're saying is, 'I get it, but I don't trust the people in Kansas to get it.' But isn't that what the whole hope and change thing is supposed to be about? That they will get it."
Somehow, I expect that you wouldn't see the McCain campaign or his supporters getting all hot and bothered about a cartoon making fun of their guy. James Taranto points to a couple of rather vicious John McCain cartoons in the Seattle Post Intelligencer and Rolling Stone that haven't seemed to raise a single ripple of comment. And just think of all the Bush jokes and cartoons that we've seen the past eight years. Republicans are so used to liberal comics making fun of them that they're rather inured to the whole thing and know better than to raise a fuss and give a lame joke more prominence. Obama's team just isn't used to seeing their guy get ridiculed and so haven't developed that thick skin that every politician needs.
Now that the New York Times has pointed out the dearth of Obama jokes, perhaps the late night comics will take up the challenge of ridiculing the Lightworker. Their reputations as satirists are at stake.
