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Ironically, neither Ford nor Carter lacks the makings of an amusing President. The incumbent has "at least two professional gagwriters on his staff —though he sometimes fluffs their lines —and is said to laugh heartily at Chevy Chase's pratfallen Ford impersonations. Ford himself sometimes cracks that his Secret Service contingent receives combat pay when he plays golf. The outcumbent used to tell campaign crowds a story about how, as a boy selling boiled peanuts in Plains, he found there were only two kinds of people in the world, "the good people and those who didn't buy any peanuts." But as Carter admitted to Mike Royko recently: "Somebody analyzed that joke and wrote that it meant I was ruthless. So I decided to be more careful about telling jokes."
Perhaps both candidates sense that the post-Watergate times do not cry out for levity. Yet Carter and Ford are history-minded men, keenly aware that comedy is as much a part of the political process as the polling booth. And if, as Freud observed, laughter is a release from tension, campaign '76 may provide more merriment than a thousand less ambitious situation comedies. "Nobody feels he has any control, and the only way people participate in governments is by laughing at the candidates," theorizes Hal Goodman, one-half of Johnny Carson's writing team. Adds Larry Klein, the other half: "Laughing is the only form of revolt we have in this country."
Campaign Humor. Political humorists are the founding fathers of new plans to ensure voters that revolutionary right in future elections. Mark Russell has launched a campaign for federal quality control of campaign humor at the source. "I'm introducing the Federal Joke Registration Act," he reports, "under which politicians must audition before a Federal Joke Review Board composed of Ed Muskie, John Gronouski, Peter Rodino, Muhammad Ali and Barbara Jordan." And Gerald Nachman has come up with a splendid suggestion. Presidential terms are too long and campaigns too infrequent, he feels, to overcome the soporific aftereffects of a pair like Ford and Carter. "It would be nice to have a new President every year to give us new material," concludes Nachman. "If he were funny enough we could elect him for another year."
*But he could not be elected, according to the 22nd Amendment