What’s with conservatives getting all bent out of shape over humor?
Last week, after Wanda Sykes told a few Rush Limbaugh jokes at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, several commentators on the right tut-tutted. “He needs a good waterboarding,” she said, and she claimed “I think he was the twentieth hijacker. But he was so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight.”
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto intoned, “Our view is that Sykes’s joke clearly crossed the line into poor taste, unredeemed by either humor or insight,” adding, “In Obama’s wide grin as Sykes was telling her joke, we saw the smug look of a man who enjoys seeing his critics dehumanized. The president of the United States should be better than this.”
Today the Journal joke squad is at it again, this time with an op-ed by Glenn Harlan Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds takes exception to President Obama’s joke about auditing Arizona State University after they refused to give him an honorary degree:
“I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor.
Really? It’s hard to see the humor? I thought it was pretty darn funny. In fact, it was kind of classy of the president to make a joke that defused the whole kerfuffle.
Perhaps if the president were prone to using the power of his office to settle personal scores, the joke would have been out of bounds. For instance, it would have sounded a little creepy if Bill Clinton had said it.
But even though he’s a big-government guy, President Obama doesn’t exhibit any tendency to use his office for personal gain (or punishment). And now that he’s on record with the joke, he’s even less likely to follow through on his “threat.”
Obviously humor is a very personal matter. But let’s stop treating the president like a piece of fine china. He’s aware of the minor tempests that swirl around his presidency and he’s comfortable making — or laughing at — jokes about them.
Mr. Reynolds writes, “Ill-chosen remarks like his ASU audit threat suggest that he … doesn’t appreciate the role of moral capital.” But I think Mr. Reynolds fails to appreciate the role of humor in making the president accessible to his audience.
