But Obama is much more likely to re

But Obama is much more likely to reserve his sharpest flashes of wit for his adversaries, antagonists and even (in a kind of throwback Henny Youngmanesque style) for the wife he invariably portrays as hectoring.

And as is often the case with other rhetorical aspects of his presidency, Obama sometimes seems to deliver his jokes — however effective they may be — with the disembodied distance of someone observing his own performance.

“Here’s my take on President Obama,” said Mark Katz, a veteran Democratic humor writer. “I think he’s smart, he’s funny, he’s self-aware. To me, it doesn’t sound like his voice. To me, he looks like a guy having a great time reading the really funny jokes his staff put together, but I just don’t hear his voice. I just don’t.”

Obama generally eschews the kind of deadly self-directed stinger George W. Bush delivered at his first Gridiron Club dinner in 2001, when he allowed: “Those stories about my intellectual capacity do get under my skin. You know for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, ‘Intelligence Briefing.’” And near the end of his tenure, Bush said he was considering “something really fun and creative” for his memoirs, “You know, maybe a pop-up book.”



Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/05/how_funny_is_president_obama.html#ixzz3Ju7LlIJz
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