Obama is just Not Comedy Material...According to 'Saturday Night Live' Writer

At last, we know the reason why comedy writers don’t make fun of President Obama much.

It turns out the man is completely unmockable.

We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime “Saturday Night Live” specialist in political japery. “If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10,’” the writer says in the expanded new edition of the “SNL” oral history book, “Live from New York.”
“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature. [Al] Gore had all these ‘handles,’ so did Bush, Clinton and Sarah Palin, and even Hillary had them. But with Obama, it was the phenomenon — less about him and more about the effect he had on other people and the way he changed their behavior. So that’s the way I wrote him.”


In a new book, “Politics Is a Joke!” three academics tabulated 100,000 jokes told by late-night comics over the last 20 years. They found that in 2008 only 6% of the jokes were about Obama (Palin attracted as many jokes in four months as he did all year). And those jokes had a tendency to be about as barbed as cotton candy.
In every presidential campaign since 1992, the researchers found, comedians aimed more jokes at Republicans than they did at Democrats. Overall, twice as many barbs flew at the GOP.


Now that he has retired from the show and gained a little perspective, Downey comments in “Live from New York,” “I have to say, that the last couple seasons of the show were the only two in the show’s history where we were totally like every other comedy show: basically, an arm of the Hollywood Democratic establishment. . . . We just stopped doing anything which could even be misinterpreted as a criticism of Obama.”


Although Mr Obama is far from being flawless, I have indeed noticed a distinct lack of mockery aimed at him. It is an interesting phenomenon in light of the amazing amount of comedy material and one-liners aimed at previous presidents. What is it about Obama? Anyone have a clue?