THE STUMP JANUARY 27, 2012
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[Guest post by Simon van Zuylen-Wood]
Barack Obama, you’ll recall, tried out a joke during Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Citing an onerous regulation that forced dairy farmers to prove they were capable of managing spills, Obama cracked, “With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.” Yuk, yuk.
Thinking back on it, I can’t help but notice a parallel to last year’s requisite State of the Union joke. Then, Obama lamented that freshwater salmon were regulated by one federal agency; salmon by another: “I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked."
SOTU speeches are an opportunity to curry favor with both parties. That is one reason Obama likes mocking government’s inefficiencies—because it’s something we can all get behind, in theory. Bureaucracies can be so stifling and irrational, Obama is telling us, it’s plain laughable!
At the risk of ascribing too much importance to State of the Union speeches, here’s a case for cutting out the bureaucracy jokes. For one, conservatives don’t think government inefficiency is goofy. They think it’s tragic. Second, liberals tend to think tight government regulation, however goofy, is necessary. For example, see Gawker’s unusually earnest rebuke to the joke, which compiled a list of environmentally hazardous milk spills.
Despite the apparent enjoyment Joe Biden derives from them, it’s perhaps best to leave out the jokes altogether, no matter the context. See this NPR-produced word cloud, in which listeners chose the words that best described last year’s SOTU.
If last year’s “Win the Future” motif fell flat, this year’s theme, "the Revival of American Greatness," worked a bit better. It’d be a shame if the speech’s salient features were forgotten, all because viewers soured over a cheesy joke. Oy.
5 comments
One kind of joke might work. I remember Reagan explaining that he was appointing a group to study the tax laws and make reform recommendations and the group was to convene after the end of his first term (which meant he had to be re-elected for his tax reform plan to mean anything). There was laughter throughout the chamber which puzzled me and I had to later read "Showdown at Gucci Gulch" to find out why.
- Nusholtz
January 27, 2012 at 12:26pm
Well, you certainly have a case against really dumb jokes. Laughter itself? Not so much.
- AllanL5
January 27, 2012 at 4:18pm
What AllanL5 said. In any case, although I did not grow up on a farm, but in the suburbs, we had cows and goats and lucky me, I got to milk them before and after junior high school. No fancy automated milking machines either; just squeeze, squeeze, squeeze those teats. (Proper pronunciation "tit" by the way.] Occasionally, the cow or the goat kicked over the milk bucket before I was done. I didn't think that was one bit funny. At least, at the time. Well, that was about 1956, or so. Now, in 2012, swimming in nostalgia (if not milk), I do chuckle a bit, but I bet you don't. I guess you had to be there. Anybody else here who grew up milking dairy animals?
- skahn
January 27, 2012 at 5:13pm
Obama should cut out the labored puns. The joke he made on Thanksgiving was much better: "There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this, where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland." That dry amusement at the absurdity of the world seems much more authentic to Obama, and it's also a lot funnier. That said, I don't think the SOTU is really a good place for any kind of joke, especially when you're trying to issue a call to action.
- Dausuul
January 28, 2012 at 9:53am
@skahn: Never milked anything, but I've plucked chickens on a couple of occasions. It's a shit job... in a very literal sense.
- Dausuul
January 28, 2012 at 9:55am