Barack the Magic Roaster

Our president is such a card! He had them rolling in the aisles at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night. He ripped everyone from Rahm Emanuel to Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney to Joe Biden to himself with jokes supplied by his most avid constituency, Hollywood, delivered to an audience comprised primarily of his “journalist” lapdogs.

It doesn’t get any better than that for a jokemeister.

Immanuel Kant defined laughter as “an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing.” Judging by the belly laughs evoked by the professional jokes Obama told with panache, any tension in the Washington Hilton ballroom dissipated into nothingness as soon as he told his first yuk.

The nature of jokes can say a great deal about the tellers and about the hearers.

Of course, this was an affair usually characterized by zingers from all sides of the political spectrum but this also was the Obama Show and how he zinged his subjects revealed a lot about him and about what’s on his mind these days.

Being able to pick and choose from all the best comic material Hollywood writers had to offer, he no doubt passed on some amusing anecdotes that were lamers and probably some that were politically over the top, even for the Left Coast crew. Off limits, for example, would be any innuendos that Helen Thomas and Hillary Clinton were closet lesbians as well as any comic references to Michelle’s overbite.

One of the better admissible digs took aim at Obama’s Chief of Staff and his background in the rough and tumble life of Chicago politics: “This [Mother’s Day Eve] is a tough holiday for Rahm. He’s not used to saying the word ‘day’ after ‘mother.’ “ Rahm’s mom would have been so proud with the suggestion that her son customarily followed the word ”mother” with “f****r.”

He quipped on the new closeness he now had with his primary opponent Hillary by saying, “The minute she got back from [swine flu-infested] Mexico, she pulled me into a hug and said I should go down there myself.” That crack probably wasn’t too far from the truth. However, the rumors that Hill still sticks pins into her Obama voodoo doll are absolutely unsubstantiated.

Playing on his messianic, god-like aura in some quarters, he delivered this ostensibly self-deprecating line, “My next 100 days will be so successful, I will complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest,” after “building a library dedicated to my first 100 days.”

Actually, word is that his 100-day library is all but completed and that he has vowed to complete the next 100 by Thursday, providing his teleprompter agrees.

(Quotes but not the editorial comments were taken from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/09/AR2009050902802_pf.html.)

Obama’s recognized his media buddies in this deferential genuflection posed as a jibe: ”Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me. Apologies to the Fox table.”

That particular reference was less a joke than it was Obama’s expression of appreciation for the mass media idolatry and his gut antipathy toward the only network that sees him for what he is, reports what he says and does, and lets its viewers make a final determination of what it all means.

So, was Saturday night’s Correspondents’ Dinner all in good fun? Maybe in Obama’s mind, aware as he was of his appreciative audience who were virtually hysterical with laughter. Nothing less was expected from the White Press Corps and the invited non-correspondents.

The audience was overflowing with Tinseltown’s elites such as Glenn Close, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Garner, Ben Affleck, Natalie Portman, Stevie Wonder, Sting, John Cusack, Demi Moore, Alicia Keys, Eva Longoria Parker, Forest Whitaker, “Ludacris,” George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg.

All are said to be close observers of the political scene, even if their journalistic credentials are a tad incomplete. All would probably opt for a revified Leon Trotsky over any Republican should Leon ever be declared an American by birth.

Actors Gary Sinise, Sly Stallone, Kurt Russell, Clint Eastwood, Dennis Hopper, James Woods, Stephen Baldwin, and Jim Caviezal were conspicuous by their absence. Apparently they weren’t invited.

Hey, we all have missed out on invites, no? But have we missed out on an invite to a major dinner/roast in which a speaker has hilariously advocated for someone’s death and used the 9/11 attacks as a prop for humor?

President Obama was tickled pinkish by the witticisms of Wanda Sykes, a “quickwitted” nonentity and fellow black comic. He all but fell out of his chair guffawing at Sykes’ riotously funny routine in which she said Rush Limbaugh was the 20th highjacker on September 11th, 2001 and was guilty of treason for not being an Obama camp follower.

What really brought the house down was her hope that Limbaugh should die of kidney failure. . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com)