by Ken Jennings
Corwin’s Law held sway over American politics for over a century—and, remarkably, comedy largely returned the favor, keeping its nose out of government. Granted, there have always been political jokes. The classics of Athenian Old Comedy were loaded with so many then-topical references that they would have felt like episodes of South Park to an ancient Greek audience. And a candidate for the oldest recorded joke in human history is a political zinger, appearing in hieratic script on a four-thousand-year-old sheet of Egyptian papyrus. “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” I’m sure that in the Fourth Dynasty, this was a pretty sick burn on the carnal foibles of pharaoh Sneferu, but I find it a little confusing today. He’s supposed to go fishing for women . . . but they’re already in the nets? They’re the fish and they’ve caught themselves? Is he going to have sex with the “fish”? This could use some work in my opinion.
But in our age of bottomless topical satire, it’s hard for us to imagine how toothless most “political” humor used to be. Gilded Age cartoonists were pretty good at riling up urbanites against corrupt political machines, but with the dawn of the twentieth century, comedy began to take pains not to alienate either side of the aisle. Even a moral conscience and voice of reform like Will Rogers carefully aimed his wisecracks at out-of-touch politicians in general, giving birth to a century of hacky-but-nonpartisan quips about “those clowns in Congress.” Before Mort Sahl, no one ever got up on a nightclub stage and spun topical jokes out of the day’s headlines—and Sahl’s fellow comedians warned him he’d never make it if he didn’t trade his V-neck sweater in for a tuxedo and get back to one-liners about mothers-in-law, like a real comedian. When Sahl poked fun at the Kennedy administration, Joe Kennedy tried to get him blackballed from clubs, because joking about the presidency in 1962 Just Wasn’t Done. Even a good-natured comedy record like The First Family, with impersonator Vaughn Meader parodying life in the Kennedy White House, was turned down by four different record labels before a small outfit called Cadence Records agreed to release it. One label executive, former Eisenhower press secretary James Hagerty, warned that the album, with its gentle jokes about touch football and rocking chairs, would be “degrading to the presidency” and a Christmas present to “every Communist country in the world.” Hagerty was proved wrong: The First Family was not a hit in Russia or Cuba,III but it did immediately became the fastest-selling record in U.S. history.IV
In the early 1960s, just as it was about to revolutionize pop music as well, Britain changed the comedy rules. The same year that U.S. radio stations were pussyfooting around The First Family, the BBC debuted That Was the Week That Was, a groundbreaking Saturday-night satire program hosted by David Frost. In defiance of polite comic tradition, That Was the Week That Was took off the gloves and gleefully named names, savaging hypocrisy and corruption everywhere it could find it, from business to religion to royalty—but particularly in the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. TW3’s weekly meat-grinding of Home Secretary Henry Brooke, including accusations at one point that he was essentially complicit in murder, helped hasten the end of Brooke’s political career. This was the beginning of Britain’s great satire boom of the 1960s, and you can draw a straight line directly to the Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show and all the American shows that soon began to blur the once-abandoned DMZ between comedy and politics.
The first high-profile violation of Corwin’s Law appeared on Laugh-In, in fact. In 1968, on the second-season premiere of the fast-paced sketch show, a close-up of presidential candidate Richard Nixon abruptly appeared onscreen, like a mad genius commandeering the airwaves in a movie. The election was just two months away. “Sock it to me?!?” he asked incredulously. The cameo lasted just four seconds, and then the awkward, jowly specter was gone, replaced with more conventional candy-colored sixties shtick. Audiences might have wondered if they had just imagined it. “Was . . . was that Nixon?”
The clip is even more bewildering now, out of context. “Sock it to me” was one of the most popular Laugh-In catchphrases, from a bizarre running gag in which sweet young British actress Judy Carne would stand on an empty stage in a minidress and say, “Sock it to me!” after which she would be abused in humiliating ways (sprayed with water, pounded by a caveman club, dress ripped off) while the laugh track roared. This was very funny at the time, because she was a woman. The unexpected substitution of Nixon was the curveball, and was a last-minute Plan C when the candidate refused to try other Laugh-In catchphrases like “What’s a bippy?” and “Good night, Dick.” The four-word segment took six takes, because Nixon’s line reading kept coming off as “too angry.” But how did the least funny president in recent memoryV wind up on a comedy show anyway?
It wasn’t just a comic whim. Though audiences at the time didn’t know it, Laugh-In head writer Paul Keyes was a longtime Nixon speechwriter who was still on the campaign payroll. Keyes told Nixon that a Laugh-In cameo, by appealing to young voters, could be a game-changer in a tight election. Nixon believed Keyes because he had been right before. In 1963, Keyes had urged Jack Paar to invite Nixon onto The Tonight Show, at a time when Nixon was still in political exile after losing the 1960 presidential election to the slicker, more TV-friendly John F. Kennedy. Paar and Keyes had softened Nixon’s image by bringing on a grand piano and having him play a concerto of his own composition. Describing the appearance in 1964’s Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan didn’t miss its import. “A few timely touches like this would have quite altered the result of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign,” he noted ominously. Five years later, McLuhan was proved right: Keyes’s Laugh-In gambit paid off. The press pool was amazed to see college kids start showing up at Nixon rallies with “Sock it to me, Dick, baby” signs. In November, Nixon narrowly won the popular vote over a split Democratic Party, and forever credited Laugh-In with the win.VI
Once politicians saw that Corwin’s Law no longer applied in the mass media era, there was no stopping them. The appeal of watching government bigwigs loosen their ties and goof around is obvious: it’s the same voyeuristic impulse behind Us Weekly’s feature “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” plus the added geopolitical frisson of somehow peeking behind the curtain, getting a forbidden look at what really happens in the corridors of power when the photo op is over. But the candor is all a charade—as Nixon proved, no actual comedy chops are even necessary. In 1984, Margaret Thatcher, one of the least funny people of the twentieth century, wrote her own sketch based on the BBC’s hit comedy Yes, Prime Minister,VII privately rehearsed it twenty-three times with staff, and persuaded the show’s stars to act it out with her on an awards show. Why was the most powerful woman in the world going to all this trouble? “She was losing popularity,” explained Yes, Prime Minister cocreator Jonathan Lynn, “and, though not very amusing herself, she knew the power of humor. She was co-opting the show to make people like her more.”VIII
The Comeback Kid
The dam broke in 1992. I was a college freshman, and eager not merely to vote for the first time but to “Rock the Vote,” as MTV was then insisting. The recording industry organization of that name was nominally nonpartisan (and had actually been founded in 1990 to oppose Tipper Gore’s music censorship efforts) but the Left began to see youth turnout as a possible way to end their twelve years in the wilderness following the Reagan Revolution. And this election in particular felt like a generational shift: for the first time, a baby boomer, raised on television with his mother’s milk, was running for president.
Bill Clinton’s career had already been saved once by TV comedy. In 1988, as governor of Arkansas and a rising star in the Democratic Party, he’d been given a plum role at the party’s Atlanta convention: a prime-time speech officially nominating Michael Dukakis for the presidency. But Clinton’s speech was an unqualified disaster. He lost the crowd early and rambled on for twice his allotted
time. The networks cut away, and delegates began to yell, “Wrap it up!” Thirty-three minutes in, when he began a sentence with “In closing,” cheers finally rang through the hall.
Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the producer of the hit sitcom Designing Women and a close friend of the Clintons, had watched the speech and knew Clinton’s political future was on the line. In the middle of the night, she woke up her husband, Harry, with an idea straight from her wheelhouse: television comedy. “Look,” she said, “he’s got to go on the Carson show to make this right.” The next day, The Tonight Show’s producers told the Thomasons that it wasn’t going to happen; Johnny never had politicians on as guests. But Harry had a brainstorm: what if Clinton went on and played saxophone with the band? The producers finally agreed to the appearance, and Clinton’s rueful self-deprecation charmed the socks off Johnny, ending his bad media cycle within a week. The media called it the fastest turnaround in political history, and everyone took note.
So it was no surprise four years later when Clinton made the Thomasons’ playbook central to his own presidential campaign. He spent as much time talking to Larry King and Phil Donahue as he did with the reporters of Meet the Press. He dusted off his saxophone to wail away on “Heartbreak Hotel” with Arsenio Hall’s house band and spent an hour nodding empathetically with college kids at an MTV town hall two weeks later. It’s a measure of just how starchy American politics was in 1992 that flannel-wearing Gen X slackers immediately seized on Clinton as the “cool” candidate even though he was a middle-aged southern man playing thirty-five-year-old Elvis tunes in Risky Business sunglasses.
This was one of those rare moments in culture where everything changed permanently and everyone knew it at once. Barbara Walters protested that Clinton’s TV offensive was “undignified”; conservative bloviator George Will began a decade of screeds about how the “vulgarian” Clintons were coarsening American culture. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker worried about “the association with jazz music and dark shades and The Arsenio Hall Show,” a take that even for 1992 seems to be going out of its way to sound racist. In the same vein, when Clinton’s opponent George H. W. Bush insisted that he would never appear on shows like Larry King Live or Donahue “because I’m the president,” his press secretary clarified that he would actually accept “just about any invitation”—except one from Arsenio Hall. But the ferocity of the old-media pushback just showed how abruptly and irrevocably the ship had sailed. Clinton won the presidency decisively, with young people voting in record numbers.IX “The separation between theater and state broke down,” comedian Robert Klein observed, “and show biz and politics came crashing together with a blurry, amorphous thud.”
Working the Media in a Post-Corwin World
By the time of the 2008 election, late-night TV had become the front line of political messaging in America, with elected officials selling policy right alongside actors selling a new sitcom or pop stars selling a new record. Political candidates appeared on The Tonight Show twenty-two times, and twenty-one times on The Daily Show. Today the idea of a powerful politician avoiding funny chitchat with TV hosts seems quaint at best, and suspiciously undemocratic at worst. Of course we need to see senators and cabinet members maintaining rictus grins as they play along with “desk bits” by Leno and Letterman and their successors. Of course political candidates should have an array of one-line zingers at the ready during debates, like insult comics. Of course the president, in addition to his mastery of legislative, regulatory, economic, military, and diplomatic issues, should be forced to do a tight fifteen minutes of stand-up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner every April. (That once-obscure event snowballed into such a national media circus in the age of politics-as-showbiz that in Washington it’s now nicknamed “Nerd Prom.”)
The 2008 election produced an even smoother, funnier, more media-friendly president than Clinton, one who thrived in this new arena. Barack Obama looked comfortable “slow-jamming the news” with Jimmy Fallon, sparring with Charles Barkley about the relative merits of Jordan vs. LeBron at the NBA All-Star Game, or joking about reality TV with the hosts of The View. A fan of cool comedians from Richard Pryor to Louis C.K., Obama had a calm, slightly detached comic persona that turned out to be a perfect match for the Daily Show era. At the 2013 Correspondents’ Dinner, he had no fear about trying an acidly blunt antijoke like this one, about the Republican senate majority leader:
Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?” they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?
On the page, it doesn’t even read as a joke, but Obama’s pause after “Really?” and the slight exasperation in the punch line earned him his biggest laugh of the night. There was no Reaganesque twinkle in his deadpan; he was skating closer to the edge.X “I was very impressed with that,” Andy Kindler told me. “You have to have a very good sense of humor to sign off on that joke, and good delivery to sell it. He’s got—well, I’d like to say a refined sense of humor, but I hear he liked Entourage.” Nobody’s perfect.
The decline of traditional news and balkanization of media led Obama far afield to reach millennial voters, and comedy outlets—particularly new digital ones—were among the most surprising beneficiaries. Even in 2015, it was still eye-opening to have a sitting president discussing race relations in Marc Maron’s garage—the first episode of WTF ever where Maron didn’t spell out for listeners what the podcast’s title stood for—or pondering his political legacy while tooling around the South Lawn in a 1963 Corvette Stingray for Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The title made it official: The president of the United States wasn’t just a guy that comedians sometimes nervously joked with, which was the novelty of the Clinton and Bush years. He was now the comedian in chief.
Policy with Punch Lines
The most surprising presidential drop-in took place in March 2014, when, without any fanfare or warning, the comedy website Funny or Die posted a new installment of its periodic web series Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis. Between Two Ferns was a mock public-access show, in which an A-list celebrity of the “good sport” variety (Jennifer Lawrence, Jon Hamm) sat opposite the Hangover star in front of a black backdrop and parried or squirmed through three minutes of inept interview. Galifianakis told Brad Pitt he looked “like Hitler’s dream,” requested a donation of his sperm, and played him the Friends theme song; Natalie Portman was asked point-blank for her phone number and then about pubic hair grooming. Much of the comedy is created in the editing, as the pair is often allowed to sit in uncomfortable silence while the audience cringes at Galifianakis’s latest mumbled question. Barack Obama was the last person anyone expected to see on the show, but there he was, gritting his teeth through stupid questions like “What should we do about North Ikea?” for three minutes before pivoting the conversation toward his new health care bill. “Okay, let’s get this out of the way,” sighed Galifianakis, obviously annoyed. “What did you come here to plug?”
Galifianakis and Scott Aukerman, the Comedy Bang! Bang! host who cocreated Between Two Ferns with him, had been trying unsuccessfully to get Obama on the show for six years. But by the time of the Obamacare rollout, when the administration actually started warming up to the idea, they’d pretty much given up. “We just wanted it to be good,” Aukerman told me. “We didn’t care whether it happened or not. Also, we did not think it was going to happen.” At the time of the video’s release, the White House had warned him not to discuss its filming, not even how long it took to shoot. But when I spoke to him, almost two years had passed and Aukerman didn’t mind talking about it. We were at a Thai restaurant in upper Hollywood, and political primary coverage was playing on the TV over the bar. It was a week before Christmas, and Obama was entering his last year in office.
“We were pushing for doing it exactly as we’d always done it,” Aukerman said. On a typical Between Two Ferns, the guest is
told to show up with no publicist or entourage, and then just sits on a makeshift stage for an hour or two with Galifianakis, their responses fully unscripted. “Charlize Theron just drove up herself, did the show, left. That’s really the way to do it.” The White House, unsurprisingly, didn’t think the president could just drive himself to a basement or shed for a couple hours of improv. Aukerman was reluctant to compromise, and it wasn’t just because he was worried about losing the show’s improvised feel.
“We thought the minute that they saw the jokes they were going to cancel the whole thing,” he said. “So we were doing everything we could to make sure they never saw the jokes.” Finally, Funny or Die agreed to show an outline to its White House contact, a speechwriter. “Oh my God, this is so funny!” he said, reading through it. Then he started going through the outline joke by joke and explaining why they wouldn’t be able to use any of their material. Aukerman realized he’d been right, this was never going to happen. He was ready to pull out. In today’s world, the White House auditions for comedy writers, not the other way around.
But suddenly the staffer changed his mind. “You know what?” he said. “In my job, I’m always the guy who’s being asked to pull back on stuff. You shouldn’t have to do that. You guys should be able to do these jokes.” The speechwriter didn’t like Obama taking a second jab at Galifianakis’s weight (“We don’t want to make it seem like it’s a go-to joke for him”) but for the most part, the script ended up in the teleprompter untouched. Galifianakis realized he was actually going to have to ask Obama, “What’s it like to be the last black president?”XI
“With any Hollywood star, half of the jokes would have been killed before we started the interview,” marveled Aukerman. “But there was something about the White House where they weren’t from Hollywood, and they weren’t used to dealing with asshole Hollywood publicists who like to kill everything—maybe they didn’t know they could kill jokes. They let us do stuff that I never in a million years thought they would let us do.”