My colleague Jeff Nussbaum was quoted in a piece in this morning’s New York Times, regarding late night comics’ increasing willingness to poke fun at the president.  Exhibit A:  Jay Leno calls Obama’s Nobel Preace Prize his biggest accomplishment as president so far.

Key passages below:

…from the outset, Mr. Obama has been praised as someone who “gets late night,” whose ironic and self-deprecating humor is well-suited to the genre’s sensibilities. He was the first sitting president to appear as a guest of Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s. “You ignore their influence at your peril,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House’s deputy communications director. “They are often leading indicators of where the narrative is headed.”…

Jeff Nussbaum, a Democratic speech and joke writer, disagrees that late-night comedy is a leading indicator of a cultural zeitgeist. “To use an economic term, it is more of a lagging indicator,” he said, something that responds to perceptions that are already entrenched. In practical terms, President Obama has now been in office almost nine months, Mr. Nussbaum said, and “comedians now have a greater body of work to go after, for better or worse.”

You can read the whole piece here.