You will miss him when he is gone from the White House” is unlikely to be a belief universally held. There is, however, no denying Barack Obama will be the personality most missed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Fans of political comedy know already there will never be another comedian quite like him, not at 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue anyway. Can you imagine Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump being as funny as this next year? Obama made political comedy into a high art form.
As the stand-up comedians well know, the mastery of timing is everything. The outgoing US President was a natural at such delivery, his punch lines coming with deft comic timing. The sarcastic blows he aimed were of a calibre that would carve up opponents even as the self-deprecating wit would win him huge numbers of fans.
His gift of humour is such he can give as much as he can take. No one could have taken a more telling dig at Obama than the night’s professional comedian, Larry Wilmore of Comedy Central, who said “the President passed a chit saying time to order last drinks as the bar was closing, but don’t worry he said the same thing about Guantanamo, and you probably have eight years.”
In the last eight years, Obama has set the standards so high all successors are bound to fail at Obamour, if we could dub his brand of humour that. We will remember for long remarks that withered Donald Trump, like the killer line about Donald being good for foreign relations as he knew Miss Sweden, Miss Argentina... With Obama, comedy was also a weapon.
