Tell me a joke… please…
There is a truth about Presidential races that is rarely highlighted: the funniest candidate usually wins. The one who voters think they would have a good time with, were they to hang out, has a huge edge over their opponent.
In fact, the equation can be expressed as: where one candidate possesses greater humour than the other, they will be President – except in cases where neither possess humour, in which case the Republican wins.
In all of the Presidential races of the television age this has held to be true. Dubya was funnier than Gore and Kerry, Clinton was funnier than Bush, Reagan was funnier than Carter and so on. Neither Dukakis nor Bush Snr were funny – hence Bush Snr won. Do you see the irrefutable truth of our equation now?!
(I should point out my slight conflict of interest – in another life I’m a comedy writer, so I have a vested interest in humour This article is a bit like those surveys commissioned by a soap manufacturer that find that 96% of people enjoy a good bar of soap in the morning).
This phenomenom is more expressed as the ‘candidate you could have a beer with’ – hence Hillary Clinton’s many ludicrous attempts to ‘have a beer’ with voters… for four minutes and 3 sips. However it is humour, jokes and a relaxed smile that are the secret.
A smile is how we engage with one another and relax one another. A joke can reduce the most grandiose argument to rubble. And nothing conveys the joy of life and of being human than laughter.
The great Presidents down the years have known this – with their leadership abilities has come great wit. This heritage goes all the way back to Lincoln, who was known and criticised for making jokes about serious issues (he retorted that: “I have to laugh because I cannot cry”). For example, he once remarked: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” OK, not the greatest punchline in history – but I bet it killed in the 1860s.
No discussion, however brief, about Presidential humour would be complete without passing mention of Ronald Reagan. For British folk looking back on his presidency it must seem as inexplicable as the two Bush terms we’ve just lived through. How did an ex-actor with political views far to the right of his country’s mainstream and very little political gravitas become and stay the most powerful man in the world? The answer is that he was one of the great communicators and that he understood how important it was to use humour. At the time of the Cold War and all of the threat that it possessed, he would happily tell jokes in public about Russia:
OK, so they’re the kind of jokes your Dad would tell – and he is mocking his opponents – but he understood that people like to laugh about everything, even the serious stuff. Especially the serious stuff. Here’s one more, maybe his most famous joke, which totally destroyed what the Democrats thought was their trump card in the election race:
This entire campaign has been sadly bereft of jokes and humour. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times. It’s as if because there are ‘tough times’ the candidates don’t want to trivialise the issues with humour. Or perhaps its fear that the voracious news media will spin anything out of the ordinary as a ‘gaffe’. Well, I hate to lecture the great and the good but ‘tough times’ are exactly when we want someone to give us a bloody laugh.
Now I’m not suggesting the candidates do five minutes of stand-up as their opening statements of the debates – but please do something to make us smile and show us they’re as human as we are.
Thank the Lord for Joe Biden, who seems to have a great sense of humour. Although sadly his loquacious personality has done him as much harm as good – something he dealt with brilliantly in an early presidential debate:
He also produced without a shadow of a doubt the joke of the campaign at hapless Rudy Giuliani’s expense:
But that joke is almost a year old – and there’s been very little since.
Sadly, for humour in the campaign we now have to rely on Sarah Palin. And amazingly, not just the unintentional stuff: the other day she tried a joke. Here it is:
“I’ve never met Joe Biden. But I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade.”
That’s a joke about Joe Biden being old. It’s rubbish.
She is still giving us plenty of laughs though – tragically for her, mainly in her serious interviews. Here she expertly explains, seemingly with a straight face, why living in Alaska makes her qualified to do the wars, global trade deals and all those other tiny things you have to look after when vice-president:
It’s a great argument, that: “I’m near people from other countries and I’m under their planes therefore I’m a foreign policy expert”. As I write this I’m quite near my kitchen which basically means I’m ready for my own BBC2 daytime cookery show. By her logic, President Bush, being from Texas – which is a long way from Canada and Russia – would be totally ignorant of foreign policy. (Hang on maybe she’s onto something.) The amazing thing is, she’s in line to be a 72-year-old’s heartbeat away from the Presidency. It’s like Lincoln said with the really serious stuff – you have to laugh or you’d cry.
Sadly, neither of the Presidential candidates seem willing or maybe able to use humour. The problem is that an absence of comedy presents a real danger for Obama in this election. Remember our scientifically tested formula: if neither have a sense of humour, the Republican wins.
Obama is a serious man who is passionate about achieving serious things – but it’s worth remembering that so was Al Gore. We may have looked with bemusement at chuckling George W coming even close to beating Gore on the back of the longest period of prosperity in modern US history – but I’d submit that Presidential contests are popularity contests and that Americans want a President they can relate to. It’s possible to be disdainful of this, but if you’re going to invest that much power in one person, Americans want that to be someone who they feel they can “go for a beer with”.
That said, Obama is capable of being funny. Here’s some of him at his relaxed best:
But he needs to translate that onto the bigger stage. At the moment, and in the first debate, Obama is in danger of coming over as earnest. Earnest politicians rarely win the Presidency. Luckily for us all, he’s not against a natural communicator. However, McCain’s ’straight talking’ and ‘maverick’ tags are designed to make him seem more down-to-earth – and the Republicans will continue to try and paint Obama as an out of touch elitist as they did so successfully with Kerry, Gore and Dukakis.
So I’d offer this plea to Barack: show your human side with something other than an earnest story, show your undoubted love of life – and in the next debates, please tell us a joke. Heck, if he likes, I’ll write him a couple.
Tags: al gore, barack obama, comedy, debates, George Bush, humour, Joe Biden, John McCain, presidential debates, ronald reagan, Sarah Palin