President Obama did a stand up routine at last night’s White House Correspondents Dinner and was very funny, I thought. He got a little serious at the end, but until then, he made me laugh out loud several times. Some of his jokes fell flat (especially at the Fox table) and a couple were groaners, but most of them were pretty darned good. He had lots of funny and pointed barbs aimed at his critics, but plenty were aimed at himself and his Cabinet too.
I don’t want to dilute the impact of what he said by just repeating jokes, at least not in the OP. The videos are not that long and are worth watching just to get some of what some people will be referencing for years to come.
President Obama smiles a lot and cracks the occasional joke, but generally he’s a very serious person, so it was fun to see him lighten up for almost a whole speech. Wanda Sykes had some good/some great jokes too. She took on Limbaugh and Hannity, head on, and made them look like the fools they are. No one was safe though, not even President Obama. This may not be quite as up there as the Colbert speech from a few years ago, but I think it’s a classic too.
I agree, it was (for the most part) very good stuff. Very funny. Wanda Sykes was less funny, though perhaps it was the fact that Obama is not a comedian that made him so good (straight man deliverying silly lines).
I also can see Fox and the Right wing drudging (yes punny) up a big deal about this. They will be very very butthurt.
Some good zingers (I especially liked the one about Rahm Emanuel and how he’s not used to saying “day” after “Mother”), but these things are kind of silly. We’re essentially saying, “Way to go out there and read material that someone else wrote, Mr. President!”
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But then again, I guess we do that for speeches too*, so maybe it’s par for the course.
[sub]*Yeah, I know, Obama writes some of his own stuff in speeches, maybe even most of the speech in some cases. But I can’t imagine him sitting down and writing comedy material, so my point stands.[/sub]
Actually Bush had a good sense of comedic timing and did quite well in the same venues … one of his was the line saying regarding the firing of the attornies - something like “yeah, you know you’ve blown it when people feel sorry for lawyers.”
Republican pundits are outraged over the Limbaugh’s kidneys jokes of course. (Buchanan got there early but there are more.) Admittedly the “I hope his kidneys fail” line wasn’t funny and it was mean spirited, but how in the name of even the pretense of the shadow of fairness and balance can they be hypocritical enough to pity poor little Limbaugh over being on the receiving end of an unfunny and hateful comment will be interesting to watch.
I’ll be curious to hear what Rush himself says. Of course if he mentions it he’ll also have to mention his own comments that are far more incendiary than comments HE has called treason and his own drug addiction hypocrisy that by his own railing should have landed him in jail. But I’ve no doubt the dittoheads will lick up anything he pisses into their dish and ask for more.
He could just as easily have said that, you know you’ve blown it when liberals feel sorry for the CIA, because how many liberals didn’t feel sorry for the CIA when Valerie Plame got outed and the CIA was saddled with a horrorshow like Porter Goss? I sure did, and boy was it a weird feeling.
Yeah, I laughed at Oopma-Americans too. That was great!
Well, Plame was working on an area that conservatives and liberals alike support - keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of crazy dictators. Which is a far cry from their other job of installing and supporting crazy dictators because it benefits some US corporation or the other.
