More than one commentator described President Donald Trump’s speech at the recent White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner with variations of “the opposite of funny.” There’s no reason to elaborate because we’ve been down this road before. But what does it say about a man who thinks “lock her up” is a classic one-liner?
Trump may be the only president with little to no sense of humor, unless he secretly watches reruns of “The Honeymooners” late at night while tweeting vitriol.
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What about our other presidents? Did John Tyler, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft have funny bones? Not in the top 20 perhaps, but yes.
Our first and arguably best presidential comedian was Abraham Lincoln. He may have been known as the “Rail Splitter,” but he was also an exemplary sidesplitter. Biographies about Honest Abe often dwell on his legendary sense of humor. He would tell jokes and spin frontier tales to whoever would listen. Here’s one famous example: Accused of being two-faced, the less-than-attractive Lincoln replied, “If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?’” He was often self-deprecating and occasionally biting, as well as subtle and folksy. He once observed that laughter is “the joyful, beautiful, universal evergreen of life.”
Although he wasn’t a folksy storyteller like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy had his own approach to comedy. Like many presidents, his one-liners were often meant to defuse crises. He could not resist answering reporters’ questions with a zinger. The press loved him. His playful sophisticated wit was often aimed at his presidency, his wealthy background and occasionally his brothers, Teddy and Bobby.
Asked why he wanted to be president, Kennedy replied, “The pay is good, and I can walk to work.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right up there with the best of the presidential humorists and often joked, like Kennedy, to lighten the enormous stress a president faces. In Roosevelt’s case, these crises were World War II and the Depression. His humor was said to be charming, and he took considerable joy in teasing. He also enjoyed political humor and often quipped about members of his Cabinet and politics. “A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air,” he said. “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.”
When he was in office, Barack Obama was often funnier than the stand-up comedians who had been hired to entertain audiences at the yearly correspondents’ dinner. His timing and deadpan delivery were perfect, and he often got more laughs than the professionals. About the presidency, he said, “It’s like I was shot out of a cannon. I am so overexposed, I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse.”
A former actor, Ronald Reagan delivered witticisms with polish, which earned him the name the “Great Communicator.” He often used self-deprecating humor to get a laugh, particularly on the campaign trail and during presidential debates. When his advanced age became an issue during his second campaign in 1984, he managed to neutralize the problem with this clever line: “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and experience.”
It is said that Bill Clinton was always the last person to leave a party. His humor was a combination of down-home Arkansas drawl and Yale University sophistication. To many, he was our first funny president, certainly the coolest up to that point. He played the saxophone, which until then was not considered presidential. Like many of his predecessors, he often used humor to lower the temperature in crises.
“Being president is like running a cemetery: You’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody’s listening,” Clinton said at a campaign event for Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky.
Even our first president knew hilarity when he saw it. If George Washington appeared stodgy in portraits, it’s because of his well-known dental issues, but he loved to laugh. His taste in humor was decidedly quirky. Pranks and slapstick, such as people falling off horses, cracked him up. Friends said that he relished wit and humor, although he was not noted for actually telling jokes.
The other presidents had some semblance of comedic appreciation, whether through cynicism, irony, sarcasm, joke-telling, joke appreciation or storytelling. Some, such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower, used humor for political purposes. LBJ was a great storyteller, but many of the tales about his youth were apocryphal.
Our second president, John Adams, was said to have had a sarcastic demeanor and made biting remarks about his contemporaries. “Thanks, be to God” he once said, “that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”
Theodore Roosevelt loved to guffaw at a good joke. And he had a few good ones on his own. “When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer ‘present’ or ‘not guilty,'” he said.
Even Richard Nixon had a sense of humor, albeit it was corny, stilted and awkward. To alter his image as a dreary, grim-faced candidate, he appeared on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” a popular “Saturday Night Live”-type show in those days and delivered (badly) one of the program’s most famous phrases: “Sock it to me.”
That’s right. Even Nixon.
Writer John Blumenthal is the co-writer of the movie “Blue Streak.”
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