The crowd sitting elbow to elbow in the basement performance space at New York City's Comedy Cellar on a recent Wednesday night had pretty much had its fill of sex jokes, gay jokes, rants about New York cabdrivers and time-filling banter with the couple in the front row who had just gotten married a week ago. Then, a few minutes after midnight, James Smith, a lanky Australian stand-up who has appeared on HBO's Flight of the Conchords, bounded onto the stage for a 15-minute set to do something a little different. He talked politics.
Some of his targets were old reliables like Bill Clinton, fresh from his diplomatic jaunt to North Korea. ("We need to bring two hot Asian chicks back from North Korea in a private jet," said Smith, imagining the genesis of Clinton's recent mission. "Who should we get?") He delved into the economic crisis, pinpointing the bitter irony of banks' having to declare bankruptcy ("How do you f___ up your only job?"). And he waded fearlessly into perhaps the most treacherous satiric waters of all: the new resident of the White House.
Making jokes about Barack Obama is the big test for political comedians these days, and like many, Smith did it mostly by talking around him. Obama could never get away with the kind of sexual shenanigans that Clinton did, he mused, because Michelle wouldn't stand for it: "She would impeach him herself!" Obama's election victory was inevitable the minute Oprah Winfrey endorsed him: "There's nothing bigger than Oprah. Oprah can do anything. 'Betcha can't make a black man President.' 'Watch me!' " The joke isn't Obama himself; it's the cultural shift — and the country's reaction to it — that he represents.
President Walks into a Bar ...
The votes had barely been counted last November when the pundits started expressing anxiety. No, not just about whether the new President could right the economy or reform health care. The burning question for the Obama age: What the heck were political comedians going to do? For eight years they had enjoyed a comedic gift from the gods in George W. Bush, whose bumbling presidency provided even richer material than the cartoonish excesses of the Clinton years. But Obama, with his obvious smarts, low-key style and (most important) ability to catch the prevailing tone of irony and laugh at himself, has left the comics with little to hang their punch lines on. The best Jay Leno could do during the campaign was to poke fun at Obama's mediocre bowling skills. That went into the gutter fast.
Political satire, of course, has had its ups and downs in American comedy. The Eisenhower 1950s proved a fruitful time for outsider satirists like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, and the counterculture years of the late '60s and '70s gave rise to stand-up social commentators like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Robert Klein. By the '80s, however, stand-up had mostly retreated to the home front (Roseanne Barr), the trivia of everyday life (Jerry Seinfeld) and the carefully nonpartisan "topical" jokes of Johnny Carson. In the George W. Bush years, political comedy came back in style, not just for late-night hosts like David Letterman and Jon Stewart — who are far more willing than Carson was to let their (usually left-of-center) political views show through — but also for the foot soldiers of the comedy clubs, where even guys who made their living from penis jokes were getting laughs from W.