I keep getting excited to see President Barack Obama be charming on things! There was this morning’s Between Two Ferns, and then a few days ago there was his introduction to Sunday’s Cosmos premiere! As Steve pointed out this morning, Obama’s Between Two Ferns appearance was genuinely funny—and as I’ll point out right now, Obama’s Cosmos intro packed about as much inspiration into 30 seconds as is humanly possible.

But there’s also something kind of… off about both of those videos, and it’s taking me a while to figure out what it is, exactly, so bear with me. Alison sent me Jonathan Coe’s “Sinking Giggling into the Sea” this morning after watching the Between Two Ferns, and that’s definitely got something to do with it. Read it, and try not to think of television’s two most consistently great comedy sources, The Daily Show and Fox News, during the part about how mocking the establishment “has less in common with satire than with community hymn-singing—agreeable and heartwarming as that may be.”

I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of Coe’s piece, but it’s worth keeping in mind that people in positions of power have no doubt realized that—in “an age when politicians are judged first of all on personality, when the public assumes all of them to be deceitful, and when it’s easier and much more pleasurable to laugh about a political issue than to think about it”—the best way to diffuse criticism is to play along with those doing the criticizing.

Which brings us back to Between Two Ferns, in which the disastrous Obamacare rollout is compared to the Zune and everybody has a good laugh, and everybody thinks “Holy shit, Galifianakis got Obama,” and then, right around the point when Galifianakis starts pretending to get bored by what Obama’s saying—and right around the time we start to get bored by what Obama’s saying—we realize why Galifianakis got Obama: Because twentysomethings who dick around on the internet are exactly the people Obamacare needs in order to succeed, and twentysomethings dick around on the internet by watching Between Two Ferns. The whole thing is a funny sales pitch, but it’s still a sales pitch; we’re laughing even as we’re being manipulated.

The Ferns bit, in particular, me think of something else about another powerful American leader. It’s this chunk in Douglas Martin’s piece about the death of Harold Ramis:

“More than anyone else,” Paul Weingarten wrote in The Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1983, “Harold Ramis has shaped this generation’s ideas of what is funny.”

And to Mr. Ramis, the fact was that “comedy is inherently subversive.”

“We represent the underdog as comedy usually speaks for the lower classes,” Mr. Ramis once said. “We attack the winners.” (Via.)

Maybe that gets at why the Between Two Ferns bit feels calculated—it’s comedy, but it’s also coming from the establishment, and if there’s one thing decades of great comedy from the likes of Ramis (and, more recently, Galifianakis) have taught us, it’s that established systems need to be relentlessly, unforgivingly questioned.

I will say, though, that I feel a lot better about Between Two Ferns than I do about the Cosmos bit—probably because it’s hard not to feel like Obama’s still the underdog when it comes to making Obamacare work, which means it’s hard not to cut him some slack when it comes to trying to sell it in any way he can, even if that’s on a Funny or Die video. On the other hand, if Obama really cared about the kind of stuff that Cosmos is about, he could make more meaningful gestures than recording an inspirational 30-second intro. Like cutting NASA a bigger check.

With honor and distinction, Erik Henriksen served as the executive editor of the Portland Mercury from 2004 to 2020. He can now be found at henriksenactual.com.

7 replies on “The Problem with Obama and Comedy”

  2. So Erik hates it when people tailor their message in order to better engage with their target demographic. Good to know.

    Also Erik doesn’t know that Congress writes the budget, not Obama.

  4. I thought the Cosmos intro sounded too perfunctory to be really inspiring, and I think this was a good, creative way to get a targeted message out. Weirdly, I think the whole thing should have been considered beneath the dignity of the office if they hadn’t had the reveal at the end that they were taping in the White House.

    As for the rest of it, I agree this is overthinking things. Lots of things are a “sales pitch” if you break them down all the way, e.g. this whole site we’re using is just a mousetrap for clicks to sell ads to pay salaries to support what you actually want to do but can’t without enough money: write about culture. So you end up writing a lot of comedic blog posts you’d otherwise not write. Guess what? Obama has to do some stuff outside his comfort zone too to get what he wants, something he considers truly worthwhile. His willingness to do so should be praiseworthy, shouldn’t it?

    Here, Barry gets his message out, Zach gets some medal from the absurdist art Olympics, and you get a chuckle. Everybody wins.

    It only feels weird because a) it is shot to feel weird, b) it’s the President in a weird setting, and c) he doesn’t have the delivery and timing of a professional actor/comedian or the time to do 30 takes.

  5. I had a harsher reaction to the “Ferns” piece than you did, because all of Zach’s supposedly edgy insults were all easily-deflected softballs or nonsensical absurdities and all of Obama’s supposedly witty rejoinders were obviously written by the makers of the show rather than coming from himself. I doubt Obama has watched “Hangover 3.” Heck, he probably didn’t even watch the first one (not that I would blame him for skipping it). The putdown of Zach obviously came from Zach himself (and/or his producers) and so equally has no teeth. It was just two people pretending to be edgy when the whole thing was padded deeper than a Volvo baby carriage. It was a tired exercise in false humor, and I couldn’t find it the least bit amusing.

  6. That the Obama Administration’s PR Team understands how modern media works better than the Washington Post or the NY Times neither surprises nor alarms me.

    What is entertaining is that they are still convinced it means something more important to be the Washington Post than to be a comedy actor with a web series.

    The message the Obama PR team intended to deliver was received loud and clear, at least based on the solid page and a half of shares in my FB feed this morning.

    Would a hard hitting Washington Post article have achieved the same penetration with the highly educated, actively political and voting young middle aged (30 to 45) constituency of my Facebook thread? I doubt it.

    And yeah, I agree with the previous commenters: The fact that a traditional news outlet has to serve up Ted Cruz pablum as counter argument in order to appear objective does not, in fact, make their questions more probing, accurate or relevant.

    There is a role for thoughtful, ethical, investigative journalism in the world today. It’s just not the right platform to talk to young liberals about health insurance.

Comments are closed.