The State of the George W. Bush Joke

By JASON ZENGERLE

In December 1992, just weeks before departing office, President George Herbert Walker Bush invited Dana Carvey to the White House. Mr. Carvey had spent the previous four years impersonating Mr. Bush on "Saturday Night Live" as a patrician wimp, and turning Bushisms like "it’s ba-a-ad" and "wouldn’t be pru-dent at this juncture" into national punch lines. But as Mr. Carvey performed from behind a podium in the East Room, the president, according to press accounts, laughed and looked happier than he had in weeks. It wasn’t hard to see why: the humor was gentle and apolitical, making light of minor personal foibles. Speaking with reporters afterward, Mr. Bush recalled a conversation with the comedian: "He said, I hope I've never crossed the line.' And I knew exactly what he meant. And as far as I'm concerned he never has." The second President Bush's relationship to comedy is a different story. To mangle a presidential line, the state of the George W. Bush joke is mean and partisan. On late-night shows, in political advertisements and in the fertile new realm of Internet comedy, jokes about the president are much harsher than were the jokes about his father or Bill Clinton, or even the jokes that were circulating when George W. Bush first took office. Back then, the president was teased about poor syntax and low I.Q. Now many Bush jokes portray the president as an irresponsible, duplicitous menace. In part, this change is due to an increasingly unpopular war and an unsteady economy. It also may be that all comedy has become harsher in recent years. But partly it is because, since Mr. Bush took office, the left has belatedly rediscovered humor as a political tool. The best indicator of the state of George W. Bush humor may be Will Ferrell. Like Mr. Carvey, Mr. Ferrell made a name for himself playing a President Bush on "Saturday Night Live." Initially, Mr. Ferrell's impersonation was also of the kinder and gentler variety. During the 2000 campaign and the president's first years in office, Mr. Ferrell's Bush was a harmless, amiable dunce - a man who answered "strategery" when asked to sum up his candidacy in one word, and who played with a ball of twine while his brother Jeb and Al Gore discussed the disputed election. Compared to Darrell Hammond's pompous, know-it-all Gore, Mr. Ferrell's Bush seemed downright likable. Which may be why the impersonation seemed to sit so well with Mr. Bush himself: shortly before the 2000 election Mr. Bush appeared on "Saturday Night Live" to poke fun at his malapropisms and, once in office, his top political adviser, Karl Rove, dubbed his weekly meeting of senior aides the "Strategery Group." It's doubtful anyone at the White House is laughing along with Mr. Ferrell now. Although he left "Saturday Night Live" in 2002, Mr. Ferrell recently reprised his Bush impersonation, first at a fund-raiser for the environmental organization the Natural Resources Defense Council in May and then in an Internet advertisement for the liberal political group America Coming Together released late last month. (The ad can be viewed at http://whitehousewest.com ) As Mr. Ferrell plays him today, the president is still a dunce, entranced by his Gameboy and terrified of a horse grazing innocently nearby. But he has become an ideologue. "There are certain liberal agitators out there who'd like you to believe my administration is not doing such a good job," he warns in the ad. "Of course, these are people such as Howard Stern, Richard Clark and the news." At the fund-raiser, Mr. Ferrell's Bush, who was wearing a flight suit, boasted of his plan to replace logged ancient redwoods with "substitute trees" made out of red-painted plywood. He then told the crowd: "Will I be able to do everything you people want? No. Frankly a lot of endangered species are going to be extincted. But this is part of evolution and natural selection. Which, by the way, I don't believe in." Adam McKay, a former "Saturday Night Live" head writer who wrote the scripts for Mr. Ferrell's defense council performance and Internet ads, says: "When we first started doing Bush onSaturday Night Live,’ the Bush is dumb' joke was too good. But now, the more we've gotten to see how terrible his record is on things like the environment and how he struts and sneers and how cocky he can be, the more we've been able to refine the impersonation." It wasn't long ago that the best Bush joke was no joke at all. After Sept. 11, 2001, many comedians declared a moratorium on Bush humor. And even when they were ready to end it, often their audiences weren't. "For a decent number of weeks we'd test the waters in dress rehearsal with your basic, straightforwardBush isn’t that smart’ joke," recalls the former "Saturday Night Live" writer Mike Schur, "and it would always get a decidedly negative response, so we had to toss it out." Of course, audiences eventually came around, and the respectful hush didn’t last more than a few months. Before long, Jay Leno and David Letterman had returned to their ribbing. In the cases of Mr. Leno and Mr. Letterman, the Bush jokes are still harmless, mostly making light of the president’s intellect and maturity, or lack thereof. ("You want to reach as wide an audience as possible," Mr. Leno said in an interview. "If you get up there and say George Bush is evil, you’ve lost half the crowd.")

But by the time the Iraq war started, on shows like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Daily Show," something unusual happened: the jokes got serious. While these shows now treat John Kerry as they once treated Mr. Bush, mocking the Democratic nominee for harmless personal characteristics like his long face and stentorian voice, their jokes about Mr. Bush are unapologetically political, directly criticizing the administration and its actions. Last December on "Saturday Night Live," the "Weekend Update" host Tina Fey ridiculed the Bush administration’s distribution of lucrative Iraq rebuilding contracts. "We should reward the brave American businessmen and businesswomen who fought so hard to free Iraq from evil," she said. "Let us not forget the brave Halliburton executives that stormed Baghdad . . . or the fearless Nextel c.f.o. who threw himself on a grenade."

Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," has repeatedly insisted that he’s nonpartisan ("I’m a Whig," he recently told Fox News). But lately his Bush jokes have started to seem like a sustained argument with the president, as when Mr. Bush recently made a speech in which he declared, eight times, that as a result of the war in Iraq "America is safer." Speaking directly to a videotaped image of the president, Mr. Stewart demanded: "What criteria are you using to prove this? What evidence is there other than you saying it?" But thanks to a montage, the president only repeated the claim. "So that’s what it comes down to," Mr. Stewart intoned. "The Bush administration’s strategy to fight terrorism is repetition."

As professional comedians hack away at the president, political professionals are trying to put Bush jokes to work. Back in the 1960’s the left had just about cornered the market on ideological humor. Performers like Lenny Bruce mixed politics with smart comedy, making the right seem square and humorless in contrast. After Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies disappeared from the scene in the mid-70’s, though, lefty politics took a turn for the earnest, the sensitive and the politically correct. But the recent success of Mr. Stewart, as well as best-selling authors like Michael Moore and Al Franken, may have convinced Democratic strategists of the value of comedy. "One of the reasons people get involved in politics is social," says Sarah Leonard, a spokeswoman for the liberal group America Coming Together, which is running anti-Bush voter registration drives in 17 swing states. "And people want to belong to something that’s fun and has a lot of energy behind it."

That was the thinking behind America Coming Together’s Will Ferrell ad, and it’s worked: the group says that since its debut late last month, the ad has been downloaded more than a million times and has enticed 30,000 people to sign up as volunteers. Meanwhile, the liberal group MoveOn has come up with its own funny anti-Bush spot, to be introduced on Tuesday, that features the actor Donal Logue reprising his hilarious Jimmy the Cab Driver character - last seen on MTV promos in the mid-90’s - as a clueless Bush supporter. "Jimmy’s support for Bush," says Laura Dawn, MoveOn’s director of culture and events, "is a pretty effective and fun way of exposing the ludicrous nature of the Bush administration’s policies."

And it’s not just political pros putting Bush jokes to political use. The spirit seems to have also taken hold at the grass roots. When MoveOn held a "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest last fall in which it asked people to come up with their own anti-Bush ads, it received more than 1,500 submissions - a number of them making their political points with humor. One particularly inspired home-made ad titled "If the Bush Administration Was Your Roommate" featured a belligerent twentysomething guy wreaking havoc on his group house, unilaterally deciding to paint it green and refusing to wash his dishes. This same lightheartedness will be on display among some of the protesters at the Republican National Convention next week. "Billionaires for Bush," for example - the political street theater group that features protestors in tuxes and ball gowns chanting slogans like "Blood for Oil" and "Small Government, Big Wars" - has planned a "Million Billionaire March" and a "Vigil for Corporate Welfare." "The left has a way of frying out its activists with so much negativity and anger," says Elana Levin, a member of Greene Dragon, another liberal street-theater group that will be going for laughs during its protests. "We want to be able to keep people involved in progressive politics, and making it something that’s a source of pleasure and joy is part of that."

The greatest evidence of this new jokey spirit on the left can be found on the Internet, which is home to hundreds if not thousands of independent sites put up by random people who happen to have a political grudge and a sense of humor. Shortly after 9/11, David Rees launched a cartoon strip called "Get Your War On" (www.mnftiu.cc /mnftiu.cc/war.html). While the mainstream media were still waving flags and speaking in hushed tones, Mr. Rees was attracting a devoted following for his devastatingly sarcastic take on the news. ("Oh my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna rule!" one of the strip’s cast of office drones says in the first installment. "I know!" the other drone replies. "Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War on Drugs, and now you can’t buy drugs anymore? It’ll be just like that!") The strip eventually migrated beyond the Web into a book and onto the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.

Of course, for every Web site like "Get Your War On," there are countless more that are very mildly funny at best and plain old stupid at worst. Some traffic in unflattering pictures of the president, like allhatnocattle.net, which shows him picking his nose. And many sites, like toostupidtobepresident.com, are so enamored of the Web’s visual possibilities that they assault viewers with animations of Mr. Bush doing supposedly funny things like commanding a Star Trek-style space ship (the "U.S.S. Enron Prize") and playing the role of Winnie the Pooh ("George Double Yooh") to Tony Blair’s Christopher Robin.

"None of the Bush humor on the Internet is very good," says Ana Marie Cox, the voice of the popular political humor blog wonkette.com. She says she is deluged with e-mail messages directing her to Bush humor sites. "It’s gotten to the point now that when I see a flash animation start, I just think, `This can’t be worth the bandwidth.’ "

By rediscovering the potential of humor, Democrats have unwittingly provided Republicans, too, with new opportunities. Whoopi Goldberg’s monologue at a Kerry fund-raiser last month - during which she turned the president’s name into a sexual pun - may have gotten a few laughs, or even attracted a few donations. But it was a windfall for the Bush cause, which kept it in play for days as evidence that Mr. Kerry doesn’t "share the same values" as the rest of America.

Even without Republican commentary, Bush jokes can serve to confuse the political issue. Is the president a simple-minded son of privilege who lucked his way into the White House? Then maybe he shouldn’t be held responsible for the effects of his administration. And certainly he can’t be a sinister mastermind of global domination. For some viewers, that was the problem with "Fahrenheit 9/11": if Mr. Bush is anywhere near as dumb as the film makes him out to be, how could he pull off the devious plot it attributes to him?

"I think the caricature of Bush as a bumbler has helped him more than it’s helped us," says Mike Feldman, a Democratic strategist who as a top adviser to Al Gore in 2000 saw this phenomenon first-hand. "My own view is that we need to be talking about him in a different way, which has started to catch on in this cycle: he knows exactly what he’s doing, he’s very calculating about it and he’s just not looking out for you."

But perhaps the greatest limitation of the Bush joke as a political tool is that its audience is self-selecting. "Humor is used to incite the faithful, not convince swing voters," says MoveOn’s Laura Dawn. Or as David Cross, a comedian who has performed on behalf of several anti-Bush groups this year, concedes: "I don’t have any illusions that I’m going to change anybody’s minds - unless they just came out of a coma. The last two years I’ve been mostly preaching to the choir." But at least the choir is laughing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/arts/television/X22ZENG.html