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With Bush's departure from the scene, much of the political urgency has drifted away from stand-up comedy. Pay a visit to a typical comedy club these days and you're more apt to get pummeled with details of the comedian's dating life than with his views on Obama's stimulus plan. "I'm not hearing a ton of political stuff," says Kevin Flynn, a New York–based stand-up who has a couple of Obama jokes in his repertoire but, like a lot of his colleagues, is still feeling his way along with the change in Administrations. But he doesn't think there's cause for alarm. "The first six months of Bill Clinton — and George Bush too — nothing much happened that could be made fun of. Everybody is waiting for Obama to do something or for the winds to change. It hasn't happened yet."
Ripped from the Headlines
Still, the Bush years got stand-up comics reading the headlines again, and they haven't stopped. The economic crisis has been a hot topic for months, health care is coming on strong, and favorite targets like Sarah Palin and Clinton have helped out by refusing to leave the stage. But when it comes to Obama, the comics are still groping. Greg Geraldo, a club stalwart whose material was filled with anti-Bush gibes a few years ago, has moved on to Obama, but mostly to execute a deft pivot — like a bit on John McCain's befuddlement at how to combat his Democratic foe during the presidential campaign. "How the f___ am I losing? I'm a war hero!" he imagines McCain thinking. "He came this close to saying, 'He's black!' " Ted Alexandro gets a big laugh by harking back to white America's old fears of blacks moving onto their turf: "Not only is Barack Obama our first black President, but it's the end of white Presidents forever. Because you know what they say ..."
The racial angle has also provided good fodder for African-American comics like Kyle Grooms (who does one of the better Obama impressions) and Larry Wilmore, the Daily Show's "senior black correspondent," who also talks about Obama in his stand-up act. Yet Wilmore's jabs are directed, as usual, mostly at the country's reaction to Obama ("that is a very comfortable level of black") rather than the President himself; the worst he can do is lampoon Obama's habit of giving long-winded answers to even simple questions.
The problem, for white comics as well as black ones, is that they actually like Obama, and they say so. Even Lewis Black, the quivering maestro of political outrage, strains to put an edge on his obvious admiration for the President. "He's the first leader in my lifetime who's actually full of hope," Black says in his act. "His nipples are bursting with hope! He's lactating hope!" Talking after a recent set at New York's Gotham Comedy Club, Black admits that Obama is difficult to make fun of but insists he's had no trouble finding political material. "For me, it was never Bush. It was the social issues. Just because Bush left office, that doesn't mean stupidity has fled the country."