Presidential Humor

As of 5 pm (pst) Friday, Google-blog “ Bush fart jokes” and you get 1,399 hits (for what it is worth, “’Mother Theresa’ fart jokes” gets only nine.)—for an explanation, see link here. I feel no profound impulse to expand that number, but it did set me to wondering. A couple of years back, New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. published First Off the Tee, a study of our Presidents’ golf habits. It was that rarest of publishing phenomena—a journalist’s book that turned out to be more far-reaching than its pretensions.. The publisher billed it as a genial collection of sports anecdotes but it quickly won acceptance as a pretty good study of presidential character (along the way it established, if it did not introduce, the word “billigan”).

It struck me—if we can learn about presidents from golf, can we not learn also from styles of jokes? It still strikes me as a good question. The trouble is, the evidence is remarkably thin: apparently not that many presidents are all that funny. Well: Jack Kennedy gave working evidence of an urbane wit. Woodrow Wilson ditto, perhaps rather more academic (but a lousy golfer). Lyndon Johnson seems to have had a knack for the scabrous one-liner. Ronald Reagan could read the jokes on the prompt card.

But beyond that—what? Richard Nixon as a jokester? Jimmy Carter? Dwight Eisenhower? Oh, give me a break. The evidence suggests that being president and telling jokes just don’t seem to go together.

Not clear how this plays out with other world leaders. Winston Churchill certainly knew how to tell a story but he may be a special case. DeGaulle complained that you couldn’t do anything with a nation that had 200 kinds of cheese. Nikita Khruschev was famous for ‘old Russian proverbs,” some of which he was making on the spot. And one is tempted by the fantasy of a conversation between Henry the K and Mao Zedong.

K: Mr. Chairman, ve vould very much vish you vould vouchsafe…

Mao(with a goofy grin): Confucious say—girl who ride bicycle, peddle it all over town!

Nah, this is getting out of hand.Better to come back closer to come.What if we had a present who enjoyed not so much flatulence as, shall we say, knock jokes?

Knock, knock

Who’s there?

The President.

Right…

No, really…