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Some Nixon jokes, however, are genuinely funny. "It's another to give them Hubert." A new paperback, The Wit & Humor of Richard Nixon is necessarily brief (128 pages), has more than the usual amount of white space and includes Nixon's entire acceptance speech at Miami Beach, which contained not a scintilla of wit. "It's one thing to give 'em hell," he said after Hubert Humphrey had made a well-publicized visit to Harry Truman. "The Electoral College." A few were execrable. "I'm trying to graduate from college myself this fall," Nixon would tell college audiences. Then, at about the same time that people started talking about the new Nixon, he began sprinkling his speeches with one-liners.įew, to be sure, were exactly memorable. Vice President in history-Nixon was until last year the paradigm of sobriety. Perhaps because he felt he had to counterbalance his youth with seriousness for so many years-he was, at 39, the second youngest U.S. And, in fact, the President did come by the gift of laughter, in public anyway, rather late in life. To many, the fact that Nixon has even a mild sense of humor comes as a surprise. So we could write a book called "The Wit and Humor of Barack Obama." But how thick would it be? You know, there was a book called "The Wit and Humor of Richard Nixon." Here's a Time Magazine article about it from 1969: And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. "Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?'" Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork - something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country. Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. I'm not declaring favorites in the presidential campaign, but I've got to say that stuff like this makes me love Obama, at least on a personal level: I note too that it was directed at his opponent, sounded rather mean, and ended up hurting him.Īn emailer reminded me of this post of mine from back in January: David - also in those comments - came up with the first example of Obama humor: "You're likable enough, Hillary." I agree that was humor. Has he ever said anything funny?"īut let's be fair. Then I frontpaged a comment - made by my younger son - that read: "He's always been dead serious about everything. "I have no response to that" was all he said about that New Yorker cover, and I speculated that he could have laughed.

Michael Cavna, who blogs about comics for The Washington Post, wrote that "an unnerving number of North America's political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama's lips." He followed with a detailed analysis of several cartoons where Obama's lips were large, some shade of blue, or both.Okay, I raised the subject of Obama's humorlessness. (Caricatures of the president's admittedly large ears have so far escaped scrutiny.)

There have been minor kerfluffles from the left about drawing Hillary Clinton as insufficiently feminine, and from the right about depicting Condoleezza Rice as servile to President Bush.ĭrawings of President Barack Obama, however, must contend with America's history of degrading racial imagery, from ape comparisons to enormous "Sambo" lips. The late Herblock often saddled Richard Nixon with an enormous cartoon nose.

"But that deformity reveals their inner truth and makes them look more like themselves." "You have to deform someone facially in order to make a larger point about their character," Rauser said.