ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996 TAG: 9608190118
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: DALLAS
SOURCE: ED BARK/DALLAS MORNING NEWS
JAY LENO hit below the belt to get his ``first really big laugh'' at Bob Dole's expense.
``On MTV, they asked Dole if he wore boxers or briefs,'' Leno told ``Tonight Show'' viewers during the presidential primary campaign. Pause, one-two. ``And he said, `Depends.'''
As for President Clinton, it's no wonder he ``likes the Olympic torch so much,'' Leno recently joked. ``It's the first time he's been around an old flame that he hasn't had to deny anything.''
Whether you're grinning, groaning or grimacing depends on more than your candidate of choice. Sensibilities, generation gaps and any lingering ``respect for the presidency'' also can make or break America's funny bones. Are today's comedians less filling, more infantile? Or are they merely in sync with cynical times that demand a crass course in political humor? Can an avalanche of barbed one-liners affect an election or trivialize it to the point of absurdity? Go ahead, laugh.
Two generations ago, as a boy in South Dakota, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recalls watching his father tip his hat to President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he visited the state. FDR was a liberal Democrat, and Brokaw's father a conservative Republican.
``I'm not doing it for Roosevelt. I'm doing it for the office,'' he recalls his dad telling him.
``You'd never see anybody doing that anymore,'' Brokaw says now. ``I don't mean to raise politicians to sainthood level. But we're kind of all in this together. If we just constantly demean people who come into public service in the most base possible way, I don't think that's such a great idea.''
Bob Hope's gently jabbing monologues of the elder Brokaw's time have given way to ``Saturday Night Live's'' thumb-in-the-eye satire. The comparatively cerebral humor of a now-autumnal Mort Sahl collides with the gut-level ``Animal House'' instincts of Leno and fellow late-nighters David Letterman (``Bill Tubby, our president'') and Conan O'Brien (``Earlier today Bob Dole ended his 35-year career in Congress. Tomorrow he'll be taken out to the country where they'll use him to make glue'').
Dana Carvey's since-canceled ABC comedy series depicted a mock Pat Buchanan chomping on a ``spicy Mexican heart'' to underscore his get-tough immigration policy. Mix in the Comedy Central cable channel's ongoing campaign coverage, spearheaded by nightly doses of ``Politically Incorrect.'' And on HBO, Dennis Miller rants about the ``ruddy-faced frat rat'' running the country.
``When I was a kid, topical political humor was Bob Hope making a joke about Eisenhower's golf game,'' says ABC political analyst Jeff Greenfield.
As a grown-up, he wonders whether ``this endless spate of jokes on mainstream television - that Dole is senile and Clinton is a fat, sex-crazed whatever'' - is yielding a ``whole bundle of ironic if not sarcastic coverage'' of presidential politics.
His ABC colleague Cokie Roberts contends that ``late-night comedians had as much as anything to do with the fact that Dan Quayle was never able to achieve a seriousness in the minds of the American people.''
``Late, Late Show'' host Tom Snyder, who regularly has political comedians as guests, recoils at a joke about Dole ``going in for his annual autopsy.''
``That's kinda cruel,'' he says. ``There are a lot of young comedians today who have really got a mean streak going. I don't find it funny.''
To which Leno defiantly replies, ``I think people take it way too seriously. Ultimately, they're just jokes!''
It's a pat answer that most comedians fall back on. Roll with the punch lines and don't worry about anyone getting hurt. But seriously, folks, might all of these jokes be reverberating in the voting booth?
``It's a valid question, but you just can't sit down and dwell on that,'' irreverent New York radio personality Don Imus said. ``Otherwise you end up doing nothing.''
``Politically Incorrect'' host Bill Maher, whose show will move to ABC following ``Nightline'' in January, says comedians play on - or perhaps prey on - the ``dictates'' of their audiences.
``If you do a joke about Clinton being fat or horny, people find that funny,'' he says. ``If you do a joke about Dole being old, people find that funny. As a comic, you have to go with that.''
Bay Buchanan, whose brother, Pat, has been boiled down to a brown-shirted Nazi by late-night comics, says political humor ``absolutely'' affects and infects elections.
``The hardest thing to overcome as a candidate is ridicule,'' she says. ``It sets up a perception out there that is very hard to break. But when it's strictly mean-spirited, it's more a case of liberal against conservative. When Jay Leno beats up on Pat Buchanan, our people know Jay Leno is coming from a different point of view, and that's how he is. You'd rather not have it, but it doesn't have the same impact as ridicule.''
Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro says politicians of all persuasions are taking too many sucker punches.
``If it gets mean-spirited, then it's not funny,'' says Ferraro, who recently became a co-host of CNN's ``Crossfire.'' ``I think going after somebody's family is just wrong. It's enough already with Hillary Clinton. People don't understand how terribly cutting some of the jabs are. They forget that the targets are human beings. It does affect people.''
Leno's defense: He's an equal-opportunity lampooner whose only agenda is easily grasped jokes.
``Americans think they like politics, but they really don't know anything about it,'' he says. ``So all your jokes have to be fairly generic. Buchanan's the extremist guy, Clinton's the sexy guy, Dole's the old guy, Perot's the rich guy. And all your jokes go off of that. ...
``To me, a mean joke is if you call someone a coward or you question their patriotism. I've never done a Chelsea joke. I've never done a joke about Bill Clinton as a father. Those all seem off-limits to me.''
Jokes about Dole's age similarly would be taboo ``if he came out with a walker and was shaking and had a stroke,'' Leno said. ``They're funny only because he has the energy of a man half his age. He's a vibrant guy. He's out there 18 hours a day, boom, boom, boom.''
ABC's Greenfield conceded that ``the kinds of things said about politicians in the old days make anything you see today on Comedy Central or `Politically Incorrect' a tea party.''
In pre-electronic times, Harper's Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast pilloried the 1872 presidential candidacy of newspaper editor Horace Greeley. The Liberal Republican Party nominee was pictured extending his hand across Abraham Lincoln's grave to his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. That was mild compared to the caricature of Greeley turning over a defenseless black man to a Ku Klux Klan member who had just knifed a black mother and her child.
Greeley later lamented, ``I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for the presidency or the penitentiary.''
Early 20th-century political humor tilted toward the benign musings of Will Rogers, whose most-remembered remark was strictly a rib-tickler. ``I'm not a member of any organized party,'' he said. ``I'm a Democrat.''
Sahl, the first and foremost political humorist of the television age, made fun of candidates without getting personal. His jokes mainly hit at their issue positions - or lack of same. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Sahl told audiences, ``Dwight Eisenhower stands for `gradualism.' Adlai Stevenson stands for `moderation.' Between these two extremes, we the people must choose.''
His one-man show, ``Mort Sahl's America,'' continues to make its way across the country. Sahl, 69, still takes the stage gripping a rolled-up newspaper and wearing a trademark V-neck sweater no matter what the season. One of his sharper lines dates to the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, when President Bush urged the country to ``remove the baggage of bigotry.''
Republicans applauded the speech, but with reservations, Sahl said. ``They said, `Yeah, that's great. But couldn't we just have a carry-on?'''
Backstage after a recent performance at a West Hollywood nightclub, Sahl says most current-day comics are ``not adventurous intellectually.''
``They're funny, they're meaner, but they're shallower,'' he said of the jokes aimed at Dole and Clinton. ``I would never say what they say about the president. They go into his boudoir, but they let him off scot-free in his public acts.''
In some ways, he doesn't blame them. ``The country hasn't been optimistic since he was shot,'' Sahl said, referring to the assassination of President Kennedy. ``It's the country they inherited. They don't see too much that's promising, and so they deploy their meager defenses to act cynical.''
Larry King recalled a prediction by the late Lenny Bruce, whose explicit sexual humor and drug addiction landed him in and out of jail during much of his cut-short career.
``I'll never forget that. We were walking along, and Lenny says, `One of the worst things that could happen is the fall of Communism. Because we're going to have to turn inward. We're going to hate our Congress, hate our Supreme Court, hate our president, hate our mayor.' He was right. The political humor is nastier today, but the society's nastier.''
Bruce's famed 1972 autobiography, ``How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,'' has an almost quaint title compared to humorist Al Franken's best-selling ``Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.'' The author later trumped himself at a Washington correspondents dinner in which he chided Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich for saying that women don't do well in combat because ``they get an infection every 30 days.'' Franken wondered aloud whether Gingrich had ever talked to his daughter about ``her first infection.'' The joke angered Gingrich, who upbraided the comedian after his performance.
Imus similarly turned the dinner tables on his guests at a Radio-TV Correspondents Association event in March. His pointed humor about the state of Clinton's marriage became the talk of Washington and, in the end, gave Imus a career boost.
``The speech from hell, as we refer to it, is an unfortunate incident in the lives of some people and a fortunate one in mine,'' says Imus, whose popular morning New York radio show will be simulcast on the new MSNBC cable network beginning in September.
Four years ago, Imus' program was credited with giving Clinton a lift in turning back opponent Jerry Brown in the pivotal New York presidential primary election. Clinton's disarming interview with Imus, during which he called himself ``Bubba,'' received heavy, favorable play in the New York media. In light of recent events, would the president do the Imus show again?
``I guess it'll depend on how close the race is,'' Imus said pragmatically.
Franken said he can think of only one modern-day presidential election in which political humor might have made a minimal difference. He cites the closely contested 1976 campaign between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in which the Republican incumbent was reduced to a ``stumblebum'' on ``Saturday Night Live'' by a pratfalling Chevy Chase.
``For the most part, I don't think it really has an effect,'' Franken said. ``Politics to a lot of people is entertainment anyway. It's a ballgame. ... With Quayle, the fact that he was such a mediocrity in terms of intellect was what made him fodder. If he had been smart, he could have gotten beyond that.''
Roger Ailes, architect of the 1988 Bush-Quayle media campaign, said that candidates ``who become national jokes can never dig themselves out of the trench.''
But as a fan of political humor, ``I think we should all be a little less uptight, including the politicians,'' Ailes said.
Leno et al. emphatically agree with that one-liner. In Leno's case, it inevitably leads to another:
``Clinton was asked who would make the best first lady, Hillary or Elizabeth Dole. `It's a hard question to answer,' he said. `I haven't slept with either of 'em.'''
Mr. Leno then asks his interviewer, ``Is that a terrible thing? Is that a mean joke?''
Depends
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