How Barack Obama killed comedy

A lot of folks are upset about comedienne Wanda Sykes’ attack on Rush Limbaugh at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

She called Rush a “traitor” and said, “I hope his kidneys fail.” Limbaugh aside, though, there were deeper problems with Sykes’ routine: It was the work of a courtier comic — embarrassingly sycophantic and unfunny.

Sykes began her routine by gushing to the president, “You’re so likable,” and spent most of her time savaging President Barack Obama’s critics. For her grand finale, she took on people who complained that the president did not adopt a rescue dog: “Look, the man has to rescue a country that’s been abused by its previous owner. Let him have a fresh start with a dog.” Edgy stuff! Lenny Bruce would be proud.

A solitary flop at stand-up is no big deal, but Sykes is not the only comic who has trouble making fun of Obama. Jon Stewart’s been a lot less amusing since his guy was elected.

Tearing into Jim Cramer makes for good TV, but Stewart’s painful earnestness hardly provides the yuks. Comedian Jackie Mason — who summed up Bill Clinton with one razor-sharp line, “At least Nixon had the decency to twitch when he lied” — says that his fellow comics have fallen prey to “hero worship.”

That’s distressing. Making fun of the president is a great American pastime, and it serves an essential democratic function.

The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner used to be an occasion for taking the bark off the president. That’s a useful ritual in a country that lacks an equivalent of “Question Time,” the parliamentary practice in which backbenchers hurl abuse at the prime minister.

Stephen Colbert did the honors at 2006’s dinner, as the moronic right-wing talk-show host from the “Colbert Report.” Colbert compared the Bush administration to the Hindenburg disaster, and suggested that the president was an ignoramus who refused to seek accurate information because “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

A former top administration aide who attended the dinner commented that President George W. Bush was furious. He had “that look [like he was] ready to blow.”

Colbert’s performance was open, in-your-face disrespect for the presidency, and many people did not care for it. Many did not like it 10 years earlier at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when President Bill Clinton had to sit uncomfortably while shock-jock Don Imus cracked jokes about Clinton’s marital infidelities — though, as always, how offended one was largely depended on one’s party affiliation.

But there’s a lot to be said for openly mocking the president. When we ridicule our leaders, we remind them — and ourselves — that they are mere mortals. They were not put on Earth to solve all our problems, and they should not be given the power to try.

We have had periods in our history when Americans thought it was inappropriate to ridicule presidents. In 1934, comedian Eddie Cantor felt compelled to ask President Franklin Roosevelt’s approval for a woefully tame radio bit where “Dr. Roosevelt” heals “Mrs. America.”

Presidential abuses thrived in that culture of deference. After the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, we learned our lesson — at least for a time — and mocked our chief executives mercilessly.

For a year or so after 9/11, we had an unofficial moratorium on presidential ridicule. Time magazine proclaimed an end to the “age of irony,” late-night comics dropped the Bush jokes and Slate suspended its “Bushisms” feature. The prevailing atmosphere of “hero worship” fed the growth of executive power and helped pave the way for a disastrous war. 

It looks like we’re entering a similar phase of president worship, and we do not have the aftershock of 9/11 as an excuse this time. Let’s hope not, because if ever a president deserved to be deflated, surely it’s our current Savior in Chief, who promises to stop the ocean’s rise, “end the age of oil in our time” and cure cancer in the teeth of a $1.8 trillion deficit.

Right about now, we could use a few laughs.