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Now why should it be funny when the President, who hired and supports Watt, makes a joke about his man's shaky reputation, while Watt is, in his own terms, as funny as a crutch? Because Reagan understands the delicacy of what George Meredith called the comic spirit. He knows that comedy serves as "an interpretation of the general mind" and must be handled with a surgeon's control. The Rose Garden remark was a joke on himself, at no one's expense, including Watt's. Indeed, it extended to the realm of absurdity the public's complaints about the Secretary's policies, implying by reversal that the President would never let Watt get out of hand. In short, Reagan knows that comedy, dealt carefully, may serve as an intellectual weapon, and thus he uses it deliberately whenever he seeks to dispel a serious national worry.
John Kennedy too was adept at this technique, poking fun at his wealth, his Harvard education, even his Catholicism ("Now I understand why Henry the Eighth set up his own church"), in the knowledge that all these attributes were of sincere concern to some portion of the electorate. Taking Indian Prime Minister Nehru on a yacht ride, Kennedy pointed out the mansions of Newport, R.I.: "I wanted you to see how the average American family lives." Gerald Ford used to kid about the Secret Service earning "combat pay" when they accompanied him on a round of golf. Even Richard Nixon, who seems to have learned the sound of laughter by listening to recordings, managed the art of comic defusing from time to time. "I don't trust President Johnson," he once observed, about to refer to a source of his own embitterment, "because of the way he looks on television."
The processes of mind set in motion by such remarks are labyrinthine but uncomplicated. The teller of the joke, realizing that there are unfavorable assumptions about him, wishes, by saying something funny, to suggest that they are unimportant or untrue. A joke may seem a frail vehicle for issuing rebuttals of substance, but it can do the job a) if the teller knows when and how to tell it and, more fundamentally, b) if he feels a basic sympathy with his critics, that is, if he takes their objections seriously enough to make a joke about them. The joke, so employed, becomes a sign of respect, and the laughter it elicits springs from the audience's appreciation of being appreciated. But the laughter is also the laughter of relief, like a great loud sigh, because curled in that laughter lies the admission that perhaps their worries about Kennedy's wealth, Nixon's 5 o'clock shadow or Ford's clumsiness were silly, exaggerated or unfounded. Almost at once, he who was a source of fear becomes an object of affection.