Hear the one about Obama?

Hear the one about Obama?

Published: July 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 19 2008 03:00

As Barack Obama prepared to leave for Europe this week, Americans fretted over why they can't seem to make jokes about him. One explanation is that he's just too wonderful - "not buffoonish in any way", as one tongue-tied comedian put it in a press account. But surely that can be fixed. What is the internet for, after all, if not to humiliate public figures who have done nothing to deserve it? Another explanation is that Mr Obama is lucky to be black at a time when white people are skittish about cracking racial jokes. True enough, but Mr Obama is more than just a black person.

He is also, for example, a stingy person, according to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times. How stingy is he? Why, he's so stingy that, in campaign headquarters, the first time you put your hand under the electric towel dispenser you get a towel. The second time, you get a message to go see David Plouffe, the tight-fisted campaign manager. Or so the joke goes. Are you laughing? No? Not even a tiny bit? Then we are getting closer to the real problem: there are plenty of jokes about Barack Obama; there just aren't any good jokes about Barack Obama. And that is because of the obstacles that partisanship has raised to political humour.

The occasion for America's comedic soul-searching was the latest dud joke, a New Yorker cover that aimed to elicit a partisan chuckle against Mr Obama's foes. In it, Mr Obama and his wife Michelle are pictured in the Oval Office, he wearing a turban, she in combat fatigues, both of them warmed by an American flag burning in the fireplace. It has infuriated Obama supporters without titillating anybody else. "I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive," candidate John McCain was quick to say. That was the gracious and decent thing to say, of course, but it was also exactly what Machiavelli would have said. The cartoon is offensive only to the extent that it is thought plausible.

The problem with the cartoon is not that it violated the amour propre of the Obama camp or bumped up against any taboos about race but that it was an artistic failure. First, its message was alien to its genre. The cartoonist, Barry Blitt, assured readers he was mocking certain "ridiculous" paranoid attitudes about the Obamas, not the Obamas themselves. But a picture cannot convey the mental states of people who are not in it, any more than a sculpture can rhyme.

Second, the visual cues Mr Blitt used were ambiguous. The Somali turban he drew on Mr Obama was the one he'd worn in a 2006 photo of an African visit, reportedly released by the Hillary Clinton campaign to embarrass him. Is Mrs Clinton one of the paranoids assailed? Is it just Republicans? Or is it an attack on gullible Middle Americans of all descriptions? As Wolf Blitzer, the CNN reporter, put it: "There are going to be a lot of people who are not sophisticated New Yorker magazine readers who don't necessarily appreciate the satire."

Understanding the cartoon requires sharing the New Yorker's prejudices, not its sophistication. Without a prior understanding that the magazine is hostile to the paranoid style in American politics and well-disposed towards the Obamas, the cartoon is unintelligible. This problem would never have come up 20 years ago, when the only people who read the New Yorker were subscribers. But today, billions of people are a mouse-click away from being New Yorker "readers". Enough clicks and the cartoon begins to convey the opposite of what it meant to. Under the influence of a hyperdemocratic medium like the internet, you can't say anything to anyone that won't be heard by everyone.

The overthrow of "elite" media makes humour harder to practise, because humour is always a collusion of some people against others - "an understanding, almost a complicity, with other laughers", as Henri Bergson wrote in 1899. Through the fear it inspires, laughter represses eccentricities. It breaks up pockets of resistance to the social consensus. Something is comic when it is rigid, inflexible, mechanical, at odds with the social graces. "And laughter," Bergson wrote, "is its punishment."

Comedy resembles politics more than we think - it provides people with identities by providing them with enemies. And it is scurrilous, defamatory politics that comedy resembles most. As politics grows more partisan, the line between humour and sloganeering blurs. During the primaries, the comedy show Saturday Night Live did an oppressively unfunny skit that showed debate moderators favouring Mr Obama. It became well-known when Mrs Clinton crowed about it in a debate. In other words, it failed as a joke but succeeded as propaganda and few Americans could tell the difference. Mrs Clinton then tried to accuse Mr Obama of borrowing oratory from the Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, saying what he offered was "not change you can believe in, it's change you can xerox". Drum roll! Mrs Clinton delivered the line during a debate as if she were some Borscht Belt stand-up comic and she was booed like one, too. The comedian Jon Stewart recently spoke about "resistance" from audiences when people make Obama jokes.

In a partisan climate, any joke that rises above mere jeering will miss its mark. For half the country, the target is too decent to ridicule; for the other half, he is beneath contempt. On the eve of the primaries, 39 per cent of young Americans told the Pew Research Center they got most of their news through late-night comedy shows. So comedy has never been more important to American politics. Perhaps as a consequence, it has never been less funny.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008