Obama, sacred cow.

Is Obama the only politician, the only candidate for the U.S. Presidency, ever to have enjoyed the unique status of sacred cow, for whom all direct jokes and lampoons are off-limits?

It seems so.

At least, as far as I know. It would make for an interesting Master’s thesis, trying to find a Presidential candidate and/or President any time in American history who enjoyed the total immunity from jokes that Obama currently enjoys.

In light of this, a recent article in the New York Times noticed, and speculated about, a telling phenomenon that has surfaced from the increasingly common interface between pop culture and politics: the late-night comedians of American television (Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, Conan, Craig Ferguson, Jon Stewart, Saturday Nite Live) have been avoiding making jokes that laugh at Obama, directly at Obama’s expense.

Why is that? Why is Obama getting special treatment, which no other candidate or politician, Democrat or Republican (or Independent, like Ralph Nader or Ross Perot) has ever received?

Over the past dozen months, I myself, a fan of most of the late-night talk shows, have been wondering why this is so. Other than a couple of overly subtle and oblique skits on SNL, I have seen nothing remotely comparable to the humor directed at all the other politicians, most notably including uninhibited lampoons targeting Obama’s only competition in the last several months, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

I would not expect the New York Times to come to the obviously logical conclusion: reverse racism. Their article does, however, tiptoe around the edges of hinting at it.

Let’s see what they say:

. . . so far, no true punch lines [about Obama] have landed.

Why? The reason cited by most of those involved in the shows is that a fundamental factor is so far missing in Mr. Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic persona.

This is hardly a plausible explanation. Are we supposed to be believe that teams of talented joke-writers on six major comedy shows who have been creating jokes about politicians for years cannot come up with a single joke that pokes fun at Obama, while they have churned out hundreds that ridicule McCain (not to mention all the other Democratic and Republican candidates who since have dropped out, as well as Hillary Clinton)? If there were no other explanation, one would have to conclude that Obama is singularly, if not uniquely, flawless.

The New York Times article quotes many comedy writers, all basically repeating this non-explanation. For example:

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.

This is preposterous. Nobody is so smooth and featureless that they completely lack characteristics capable of being comically exploited. Secondly, note that Mike Barry in the quote above is restricting the quality of a person capable of being made fun of to that of having “buffoonish” characteristics. This is unduly limiting the human behavioral pallette for comedians to use. In fact, it could be argued that such an oddly rare human being whose persona manifests no traction for comedy would also lack sufficient charisma to be a good politician.

A closely related explanation the article cites is that because Obama is popular, the audiences resist jokes that have been tried out about him, and so the writers, directors and comedians of the various shows have backed off.

. . . several representatives of the late-night shows said, that so far their audiences (and at least some of the shows’ writers) seem to be favorably disposed toward Mr. Obama, to a degree that perhaps leaves them more resistant to jokes about him than those about most previous candidates. “A lot of people are excited about his candidacy,” Mr. Sweeney said. “It’s almost like: ‘Hey, don’t go after this guy. He’s a fresh face; cut him some slack.’ ”

Bullfeathers. This is absurd.

Another explanation, however, exists: it’s the elephant in the room (and that elephant is not the Republican hopeful, McCain)—Obama is black and his campaign has centered on the race issue. Therefore, he is untouchable: political correctness will not allow comedians to make any jokes that laugh at him. And audiences too (white audiences, that is) would feel guilty about laughing at jokes poking fun at Obama and with their laughter and applause colluding in this quasi-“racist” endeavor.

At least one person interviewed by the New York Times article broached upon this most plausible explanation, producer of the David Letterman show:

“Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh,” said Rob Burnett, an executive producer for Mr. Letterman. “The audience is not going to allow anyone to do that.”

But is this a good reason to avoid treating Obama as an equal in the long line of politicians whom Letterman (and all other comedians) have raked over the coals throughout the years? Isn’t that kind of demeaning and condescending to Obama? Have we not evolved as a society past the stage of having to treat adult blacks like children for fear of hurting their feelings? What better show of equal treatment than to subject Obama to the same comedic insults as everyone else in his profession?

The litmus test of “even a whiff of being racist”—so aptly, and disturbingly, described by Rob Burnett—imposes an unreasonably low threshhold by which to to rule out jokes. Under such a standard, virtually any joke that pokes fun of Obama could be deemed to carry the poison of that “whiff”—by virtue of the fact that Obama is black and his entire political persona is based upon the sensitive race issue.

I can think of one major exception to this phenomenon: the fun poked at Jesse Jackson over the last few years, with particularly devilish mastery by Darrell Hammond on Saturday Nite Live (with able support from Kenan Thompson as Al Sharpton)—but this clever mockery occurs in a context long after Jesse Jackson stepped out of the viable political limelight. The brilliant Fred Armisen, another SNL cast member, whose impression of Prince, for example, reaches the heights and depths of true genius, has turned in a noticeably lackluster impression of Obama in the few skits SNL has concocted to include Obama, and the only direct poke at Obama which can be discerned from Armisen’s performance refers to the extraordinarily subtle dig at Obama’s unctuously polished facility for attractive-sounding sound-bites. Otherwise, the few Obama skits on SNL have poked fun at everything and everyone else in the room other than Obama himself.

On a related note, the recent hot potato in the news—the now infamous New Yorker cover of Obama and his wife dressed as an Osama-esque mujaheed-and-wife couple—is not a jab at Obama; it was a not-so-subtle satire of the “Islamophobes” out there who worry irrationally about Obama’s Islamic connections. The fact that so many Obama supporters got into a tizzy about it shows just how hypersensitive they are to any humor remotely in the general vicinity of even seeming to be aimed at Obama.

A secondary explanation that might account for some of the blackout (pun intended) on Obama jokes: the near-universal adoration of Obama among Leftists, who dominate the entertainment industry, along with their anxiety to annihilate the Bush legacy and thus not ruin the only chance they have of political salvation after suffering the agony of Bush for eight years, right into the lame-duck present and its excruciating persistence of his torturously slow exit from the stage.