Comedy relies on surprise. “Saturday Night Live” has felt painfully dull this season without Sarah Palin to kick around or Tina Fey to do the kicking. Then it surprised viewers this weekend. It kicked President Barack Obama. Even more surprising, it got away with it.
Only a few months ago, major comedians like Jon Stewart and Will Ferrell were lamenting with slack-jawed remorse how difficult it was to poke fun at Obama. How the comics missed the target-rich environments offered up by his predecessors.
Even the gifted Fred Armisen, who could pull off an Obama imitation almost good enough to fool the Secret Service, found that jokes at Obama’s expense often fell flat.
But that appears to have ended after Obama’s failed attempt to help Chicago win its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
It had to happen sooner or later. Armisen found Obama’s comedic vulnerability not on his right, where he is predictably pummeled by certain pundits, but on his left, where his supporters tend to muzzle themselves in defensive solidarity, even when they’re unhappy.
In a mock presidential address to the nation, Armisen as Obama assures angry conservatives that they have nothing to worry about. “Because when you look at my record,” he declares, “it is very clear what I have done so far — and that is nothing. Nada! Almost one year and nothing to show for it!”
Armisen’s Obama then checks off a laundry list of what he has not done: “Close (the prison at) Guantanamo Bay. Out of Iraq. Improve Afghanistan. Health care reform.” “No, no,” “worse” and “hell, no,” are the assessments of each.
And what about the left? “They’re the ones who should be mad,” he says, offering another checklist: “Global warming. Immigration reform. Gays in the military. Limits on executive power. Torture prosecutions.” Here again, the answer was “no” on each one.
Armisen’s skit passed the first test of comedy: It was funny. But was it true? Was it fact-based? And did it make a point worth making? There’s a thin line between truth and a cheap shot, especially in politics.
Fact checkers give Armisen’s checklist a mixed grade. Guantanamo is “stalled,” for example, and Iraq and health care are works in progress, according to Politifact.com, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonpartisan fact-checking Web site. Afghanistan has gotten measurably worse, but Politifact gave Obama credit for keeping his promise to send in two more brigades.
Politifact, operated by the St. Petersburg Times, monitors 515 promises Obama made as a candidate. So far, by Politifact’s count, Obama has accomplished 47 and compromised on a dozen more.
His “promises kept” include expansion of small-business loans, expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, banning lobbyists gifts to the executive branch and helping rebuild New Orleans schools.
Less visible is the stock market’s recovery of much of the value it lost last year, and economic experts say the administration’s actions probably helped avoid a much worse recession, even if jobs have yet to catch up.
After his first nine months, it is hard to call him a slacker. But Team Obama can’t afford to be too sanguine about facts. If there was a point the “SNL” skit makes, it is how politics is based less on facts than perceptions. “SNL” often has signaled changes in public perceptions and created a few of its own.
“SNL” has a 34-year history of redefining public perceptions of presidents and candidates, from Chevy Chase’s bumbling klutz of a Gerald Ford and Al Franken’s monotone-speaking Paul Simon (the late Democratic senator) to Ferrell’s “strategery” planning George W. Bush and Amy Poehler’s frighteningly ambitious Hillary Clinton, among others.
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“SNL’s” message reveals, among other subtle insights, a repressed discontent on the left. Liberals see a center-left president who often seems concerned with the art of compromise on issues like health care, or putting off other issues like global warming and gays in the military.
Obama came into office tackling two wars, a world economic crisis and a promise to overhaul the nation’s health care system. “SNL” offers the president a reminder that sometimes he needs to remind us of what he’s accomplished.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage