Barack Obama hoping for the last laugh as he prepares for his final bow at White House Correspondents’ dinner
President has been successful in deploying comedy as a rhetorical device to take the wind out of his opponents’ sails.
As he took the podium at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2014, President Obama was near a low point in his presidency: The roll-out of the Obamacare exchanges had not gone well, details of an electronic eavesdropping operation had been leaked to the world, and his poll numbers were near an all-time low.
“I usually start these dinners with a few self-deprecating jokes,” Obama said. “After my stellar 2013, what could I possibly talk about?”
Obama wasn’t the first president to use some version of that joke.
I was going to start off tonight telling some self-deprecating jokes. But then I couldn’t think of any mistakes I had made
“I was going to start off tonight telling some self-deprecating jokes. But then I couldn’t think of any mistakes I had made to be self-deprecating about,“ President George W. Bush said 10 years earlier.
But those transparent attempts to be self-deprecating – without actually saying anything negative – reveal an under-appreciated purpose of the president’s annual stand-up routine: Comedy can be a powerful rhetorical tool for deflating opponents, disarming critics and defusing controversy.
The correspondents dinner has become a celebrity-fuelled insider affair – “the night when Washington celebrates itself,” as Obama said last year – but the audience has also grown to include viewers on C-Span and millions more through viral snippets of presidential monologue.
The annual dinner started under President Coolidge with some light entertainment, but it was President Kennedy who first transformed his remarks into a stand-up style monologue, and presidents quickly learned to use the dinner as a way to acknowledge subjects in a way they couldn’t in a more official setting.