“I know only two tunes: one is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn’t”–Ulysses S Grant. They don’t write them like that anymore.
“You lose”–Calvin Coolidge. Imagine all the funny stuff he must have kept to himself.
Kennedy and Reagan seemed to have them trained to laugh, but the jokes don’t always hold up to scrutiny.
JFK had a quick wit and could deliver some great lines like “I’m the man who accompanies Jackie Kennedy” and “Nobody cares what Lyndon and I wear” when referring to her.
Reagan was more of a story teller than a joke teller. His story about doing a radio recreation of a ballgame, losing the feed, and having the batter foul off dozens of pitches as he waits for the feed to be re-established was a pretty good one.
W told jokes like a kid reading from a joke book. One got the feeling that he didn’t quite get it but knew it was supposed to be funny.
Obama can read a joke with the best of them, but he lacks the quick wit of JFK.
By that standard, I’d go with one of the alcoholics: maybe Grant or Harding.
The ones who preceded the Political Correctness Police, who could tell funny stories if they wanted to. Rreagan was the last of them, with his joke about the Italian at the cock fight.
Mr. Kobayashi, I hate to do this, because I love Lincoln, but he didn’t say half the things he said. The “If I were two-faced” line doesn’t seem to be real (not traceable to him). Also the line about legs should be long enough to reach the ground.
His line about getting the other generals the same kind of whiskey as Grant probably had some basis in fact, though.
I think Reagan was funny (“I knew Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Thomas Jefferson.”), Clinton was funny, Kennedy was funny (“Washington has all the charm of a northern city and all the efficiency of a southern one.”), but with these modern guys, it’s all speech writers.
I’d go with Coolidge too. Amazing dry wit.
Nixon is certainly the least funny President in my lifetime, but I give him points for appearing on Laugh-In.
Obama has been great at the Correspondents’ Dinner, and the video he did with Zach Galifianakis is fantastic … but he’s delivering (albeit with excellent timing) material written by others. He doesn’t strike me as someone who would be hilarious in person.
Grover Cleveland was funny on two non-consecutive occasions.
What if Nixon’s antisemitism was some sort of long-con ironic gag? That’d be pretty funny!
Damn, I should have listened to Lincoln when he said “The problem with internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy”
John Adams had a few good lines. He said (paraphrasing) he expected in the future children’s entire understanding of the Revolution would be that Ben Franklin smote his electrical rod into the ground and up sprang George Washington.
He also said it appeared that the best way to run for president was to announce you had no intention of becoming president.
When he’s being himself, he seems to be relaxed, genuine, comfortable, off the cuff, rational, sane, and likeable.
I distinctly remember John McCain from the days when he would actually be a frequent guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
I remember being excited by the prospect of John McCain or Hillary or Obama being our choices for president. I was happy, there was no way we would end up with a total loser as president.
Then Hillary greatly disappointed me with her campaign tactics. Then John McCain stopped being a moderate Republican with a long history of sane and rational thinking and working with Democrats and accomplishing things and making sense, and suddenly become a rock-ribbed conservative right winger, purely for the campaign season.
I hated watching someone I admired sell out and change himself into a curmudgeon with a forked tongue. I watched him make terrible decision after another and change who he was.
I didn’t like him. He seemed to lose his sense of proportion, and his sense of humor. And what’s worse, it didn’t stop when he lost the election. He stayed New McCain, and New McCain was angry and caustic and full of bile.
I don’t get it. I want to think I imagined the transition, because I’m some kind of liberal partisan wacko, who forced himself to think McCain suddenly sucked out loud because he was running against Obama. But I don’t think so. I genuinely liked the guy, he was one of the few Republicans left I still admired. At one time, I couldn’t have cared less if he beat Obama. I felt like he was different enough from G.W. Bush that it would still have been a positive.
So, either I lost my goddamned mind or he did. One of us is crazy. That’s as much as I know.
Huh?
Oh, right… funny.
Old man walks into a bar and says “ouch”. Ba-doom-boom.
His delivery always seems too stiff for me.
Zachary Taylor had a frat boy’s sense of humor. “Hey guys! Watch me chug these cherries and milk!”
One of my favorite FDR quotes was about Alf Landon, and his symbol being the sunflower. FDR pointed out that the sunflower was yellow, had a black heart, and dies before November.
That’s hilarious 
I laughed out loud, loudly! Thanks for sharing that.
Askthepizzaguy, I agree 100% with your entire post about McCain. I do remember reading an article from an Arizona blogger before the 2008 primary season even started, and it was like she/he told the future, that McCain was no moderate/maverick, and had basically hoodwinked everyone, and was really a hardcore right winger at heart and we’d see it come out in 2008 if he got nominated. It was like this person had a crystal ball, but I ignored it thinking they were just really far to the left and super biased, because McCain was a really cool Republican and I liked him a lot. I remember thinking when he won the nomination that our country was going to be headed in the right direction whether it was an R or D who won.
Anyhow, you aren’t alone. But evidently there were some folks who did realize he was who he finally appears to be from 2008 to now.
Bob Dole is also the compiler of Great Presidential Wit: A Collection of Humorous Anecdotes and Quotations. I have (or used to have) the book somewhere, but it’s not handy, so I can’t tell you how he ranked the presidents in order of funniness, but according to the blurb on Amazon, Lincoln’s at the top and Fillmore’s at the bottom.
I’m wondering if LBJ might not be the leader in the wit department.
He made the witticism of Gerald Ford playing football w/o a helmet.
He also told his staff to spread the word that an opponent of his in an election fornicated with pigs. One of his staff said “We can’t prove that!” Johnson said “Right, but, it’ll be hell hearing him trying to deny it!”
And, then, there’s the story of him waving his dong around in a Cabinet meeting, but, that might not have been humor inspired…
This is just the opposite of what I see.
Obama seems to be able to appreciate humor, but, can’t really generate any on his own, and I seem to recall ol’ Dick was alright in the wit department-in private. But, I think that Clinton has no grasp of wit/humor. I think he’d be good party company, getting blasted, but, no real witticisms would be forthcoming. He’d be the one driving the pickup with the good ol’ boys in the bed with the gate down, and he’d be throwing beers to them, but, that’d be the extent of it.
In one book that I read, IIRC, Lincoln really was spending much of his presidency telling dirty jokes.
I don’t know if I can call JFK that witty; he seemed to have a quick wit, and there was a book/booklet written about his wit, but, as with all politicians, we don’t know how many of those questions were planted by his people, with an amusing response already prepared by Theodore Sorensen (sp?).
I’m gonna go with Lincoln for the win, with Lyndon a close second.
Obama was on the radio show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” as a Senator and was pretty funny. So he can be funny ad-libbing, though he seems (probably wisely) to resist the temptation to try and make jokes on the fly as President.
Why do you think that? Seems like most descriptions I’ve read of people that met with FDR noted how much time he spent joking around. He seemed to have really liked humour.
Indeed, IIRC one of his biographers complained that it was really hard to get a read on the man, since most people who recorded interacting with him outside of policy discussions just recalled a bunch of humourous anecdotes and smoozing instead of any personal topics,
That must be in Kansas. Here in Gardena, California, there’s a gas station at the corner with a big sunflower in a small planter. It shed its seeds and leaves, then turned black and died, two weeks ago.
Reagan was a professional actor and so of course he’s going to be near the top. Telling jokes and funny stories is part of that job. It would have been kind of amazing if he hadn’t been one of the funniest Presidents.
We’ve no clips of him, but by reputation Abraham Lincoln was a joker and storyteller of legendary skill and range; calming people down with jests and amusing tales was his standard way of defusing situations.