Skip to content
Entertainment
Link copied to clipboard

What's so funny about Obama? Comedians and musicians struggle to find material

MANY COMEDIANS are really social critics disguised as entertainers. And they enjoy their best of times, come up with their best lines, when they feel displaced and powerless, railing against an establishment and condition they despise.

Will good-guy President-elect Barack Obama get a ribbing from the largely liberl, comedy and music community? (Photo illustration by JOHN SHERLOCK / Daily News)
Will good-guy President-elect Barack Obama get a ribbing from the largely liberl, comedy and music community? (Photo illustration by JOHN SHERLOCK / Daily News)Read more

MANY COMEDIANS are really social critics disguised as entertainers. And they enjoy their best of times, come up with their best lines, when they feel displaced and powerless, railing against an establishment and condition they despise.

Same goes for many contemporary musicians.

They're at their peak when they're most miserable, venting against a system (or a relationship) that's failed them.

So yeah, bad times produce good art, maybe even the best. And truth is, all that venting is also a good marketing tool to build a constituency among like-minded appreciators.

So what happens when what you most prayed for finally comes true? When the fools and scoundrels are vanquished? When unbridled pessimism and cynicism are replaced by (yuk!) good, old-fashioned, dewy, gooey optimism?

Such are the questions challenging the largely liberal, comedy and music community in the wake of Barack Obama's presidential victory.

Bad for (funny) business

"He's not stupid, he's not angry, he's not fat. Who would want a jerk like that in office?" half-kidded Bill Maher on "Larry King Live" in a post-election discussion.

Then, on his own Friday night HBO show, Maher was shockingly meek and mild, only getting riled up (again) over GOP vice president loser Sarah Palin's latest gaffes.

The next night, "Saturday Night Live" served up . . . a rerun instead of a victory party. While we were craving just one more of Tina Fey's amazing (and maybe even election-turning) Palin impressions, that ship had clearly headed back to Alaska.

Over on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," which had seen its ratings double (as has "Saturday Night Live's") in the pre-election run-up, Jon Stewart did another of his impressions of a bumbling George Bush, sending congrats to Obama "and his good bride."

Stewart then murmured plaintively, in his own voice, "I'll miss you the most" and tried his first impression of the president-elect. It sounded like Dick Cheney - all huffy, puffy and pompous.

Adding insult to injury, Stewart attempted a joke about Obama shouting out on election night to the person who'd meant the most to him "over the past 16 years . . . William Ayers."

His usually cheering studio audience just sat there.

"The joke bombed," guest Chris Wallace of the now-disloyal opposition Fox News later gloated.

"They're not ready for this."

Music to their ears

On the music front, Amy Ray, better known as half of the Indigo Girls and an even more righteously indignant solo act, said she got flummoxed on election night while performing in Toronto.

"When the word came out that Obama had won, I was about to go into a song called 'Who Sold the Gun,' a rant against the military industrial complex," said Ray, who's playing the North Star on Thursday.

"I started thinking out loud, 'Wow, I won't have to sing songs like this.'

"I didn't want to sing that song. I just wanted to do a party song, write a party song."

Same night, different pew: Protest reggae/folk/soul/hip-hop music masher Michael Franti (at the Electric Factory Nov. 20 here with his band Spearhead) started improvising a song with a two-word chorus, "Barack . . . Obama."

Often harsh, conscious rappers will.i.am, Busta Rhymes, Common and Jay-Z were likewise busy that night cranking out new (or revised) celebratory songs - like Rhymes' "Pop Champagne" and Jay-Z's "History" - that were pumping on radio and cable music channels the next day.

Going soft

Of course there's no conclusive proof liberal-minded entertainers must lose their mojo in the Obama years. Yet history does offer some warning cues: examples of self-perceived outsiders softening up when their perceived "good guys" got into power, and the social critics were invited to sit close to the fire.

Political comedian Mort Sahl cut his teeth on the bones of Dwight Eisenhower, his vice president, Dick Nixon, and their hawkish secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.

But the funny man - and comedy in general - lost its edge when John F. Kennedy (to whom Obama is oft compared) was elected.

Softball jokes about JFK's Boston accent and little kids running around the White House became fashionable, thanks to Vaughn Meader's big-selling "First Family" comedy skit album.

Funny guy Joe Piscopo also has a tale to tell of being co-opted by a brush with presidential "greatness."

In the early 1980s, when he was a "Saturday Night Live" regular, Joe was called upon to do "fairly derogatory" impressions of then President Ronald Reagan.

"And then, don't you know, I got invited to a state dinner at the White House," Piscopo recalled the other day.

"[Baseball great] Yogi Berra and I were sitting there, making jokes during an operatic performance, generally getting into trouble.

"But after the meal, I walked up to Nancy Reagan, who clearly orchestrated the whole thing, and she was so steady, respectful and nice.

"Then I met him [Reagan] - one of the warmest, most genuinely engaging individuals - and I was charmed.

"So how smart was that? Inviting me there made me see the light about Reagan and softened my approach to doing him."

(Note to Stewart, Maher, Stephen Colbert, et al: Turn down all White House invites!)

On the music front, J.F.K's "Ask what you can do for your country" entreaty encouraged the protest-song movement and then-young voices like Bob Dylan. And JFK's assassination three years later sparked a fiery activist uprising.

But later liberal presidential runs by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton deflated like-minded musicians. These presidents counted rock musicians among their biggest supporters, traded on their music in stump speeches and invited them to perform at their inaugurals. Jeez, even outlaws like Willie Nelson and the Grateful Dead got to smoke it up at the White House.

The living was groovy, but arguably, the music suffered.

Color him wha???

While concerns about political correctness might tie some comedians' hands now, opportunities could be opening for others. As Maher put it the other night, "Comedians are afraid of laughing at anything with a black person in it."

But two shows hosted by black comedians debuted in recent weeks - "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News" on CNN and David Alan Grier's "Chocolate News" on Comedy Central. Recent SNL alum and "30 Rock" regular Tracy Morgan said that black comedians who don't have Obama material will be "out of the loop."

And he argued, "White comedians have got to roll the dice, baby. And if you get into a fight, then you get into a fight, because you know how black people are going to feel about Obama.

"If you go down that road, you better be funny."

Seconding that emotion is local stand-up spieler and comedy Web master Brian McKim, who tracks the humor scene at SHECKYmagazine.com.

"Guys like Maher or Craig Ferguson shouldn't go on TV and say they're stumped. Let's face it, what we comedians do is difficult. But when asked, we shouldn't say it's hard.

"It's like the old Elaine Boosler commercial - 'Don't let them see you sweat.' "

And what if the current ruling class of lefty, liberal comedians can't make the psychic leap to bashing their articulate, idealistic and seemingly quirk-free Teflon prez?

"Then that will create an opening for comedians who can stand up to the plate and do it.

"And at least half of America will want that," argued McKim, citing jokesters like Dennis Miller, "who are capable of mocking the Democratic leadership."

Meanwhile, the sharpest Obama impressionists, writes Salamishah Tillet, Penn assistant professor of English, at theroot.com, will be those who dig much deeper than Fred Armisen's shallow take of the man on "SNL."

Tillet's looking for people who can "satirize his performance of the 'cool black man' " and can grasp the essentials of "black bourgeois respectability."

Sounds funnier already.

On the musical protest front, it will be interesting to see if President Obama continues to rail, as he did during the campaign against Hillary Clinton-basher Ludacris, against rap lyrics that perpetuate "misogyny, materialism and degrading images."

That free-speech issue aside, Amy Ray argues that there will still be plenty of fodder for foment after the honeymoon is over.

"It's not like the problems just go away.

"Human nature is to f--- up," she noted.

And globe-hopping, peace, love 'n' understanding musician Franti argued that his work, like that of the candidate he voted for, has just begun.

"One guy alone can't make the difference. We've still got 6 billion minds to change." *