Don't worry, an Obama presidency won't mean the end of comedy

by adam baer

Five months after the news broke that Obama’s cholesterol level was a low 173, D. L. Hughley responded with a fried-chicken-smoothie joke. On CNN. Without flinching. Embarrassing? Sure. But you had to feel for ol’ D.L.: Now that a black man is The Man, no one knows what flies anymore. “The old jokes have suddenly become archaic,” says David Alan Grier, whose Comedy Central show Chocolate News was planned two years before the Obama inauguration. “My white friends say, ‘Ooh, this must be great for you.’ And I’m like, ‘Why? I’m only half happy, because he’s only half black. Give me a real black man, a scary one. Then I’ll be happy.’ ”

So, fair enough: One comic may have figured it out. But that doesn’t mean the road’s been smooth. There’s a reason the entire election cycle was dominated by “McCain is old”/“Palin is dumb”/“Biden can’t shut up” cracks. Since the dawn of civilization, outsider rage has driven comedy, and the new president’s public image ranks somewhere just below “messiah” but above “pretty, pretty unicorn.” He doesn’t offer low-hanging fruit like Bush’s marble-mouthed idiocy or Clinton’s womanizing. And as Hughley found out the hard way, the road to failure is lined with musty chitlin jokes. So what to make fun of?

The sizable black comedy community seems to be testing the waters. Just four days after Obama was elected, Tommy Davidson performed an act in L.A. with a unique impression of Obama’s inauguration. (Hint: It involved a gunshot.) Tracy Morgan took a page out of White Chicks and dressed up as a pasty blond trannie on 30 Rock to prove that even now, it’s still easier to be white. And The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore e-mailed this in: “Some said that if Obama was chosen, it would show America is not racist anymore. I don’t agree: If we had elected Flavor Flav that would have shown America is no longer racist.”

But Wilmore (who covers some of this ground in his new book, I’d Rather We Got Casinos) does see change on the horizon. “I think, in the future, we’ll see more black comics doing smart political humor and more white comics complaining about The Man keeping them down,” he says. “Any white comic who is afraid of being offensive by doing racial jokes about Obama, you’re right. Don’t ‘nappy-headed ho’ yourself out of showbiz.” If that sounds like an acidic memo to Seth MacFarlane, whose urban Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show, premieres next fall, you may well be right; Fox picked up a full season before a single episode aired, a testament to its faith in MacFarlane to deliver some politically incorrect funny in the age of O. (Hopefully, some of that youth cred will rub off on that network’s news team. “During Obama’s victory speech,” Garry Shandling says, “Fox News looked like a bunch of white guys looking for a job.”)

Talk to enough comics and they’ll tell you that it’s as simple as this: Funny is funny. Let our POTUS be himself and he’ll inevitably fuck up in all kinds of entertaining ways. “Think about it as postracial humor,” says Comedy Central roastmaster Jeffrey Ross. “Barack isn’t hard to make fun of. It’s going to be about his wife running things, his big ears, bad jump shot, long speeches, and cheap suits.” Adds Lewis Black, “In this country, even though it appears white people have cornered the market on stupidity, stupidity isn’t racial. You make jokes about whatever’s there.” Even if that means turning on yourself.

“I know exactly how comedy will change,” says Louis C.K. “First of all, I personally have forty-eight hundred jokes in my act that begin with ‘The president is so white that…’ So all those will have to go. Although I will probably get at least six months where I can say, ‘Wow, remember all the presidents before this one—before the black one? Well, they sure were white. Weren’t they? In fact, they were so white that…’”