Barack Obama is a showbiz veteran, with the IMDb page to prove it. The commander-in-chief has made more than a dozen talk-show appearances, stopping by the Late Show With David Letterman, The Daily Show, The View, Live With Kelly and Michael, Ellen, Steve Harvey and even Between Two Ferns. He was the first sitting president to visit The Tonight Show in 2009, and tonight he’ll appear on one of the last-ever episodes of The Colbert Report.

It helps that Obama is a naturally charismatic subject, but objectively, his highly watchable late-night interviews aren’t much of a departure from the treatment you’d expect a dignified A-list actor to receive on the same couch—a Streep or a DeNiro, say. Take his September 2012 appearance on the Late Show. David Letterman’s opening question to the leader of the free world: “How much do you weigh?” Though gnarly real-world issues like the national debt and Libya do come up, there’s an unmistakable whimsy about the proceedings, with cracks about the first lady forgetting their anniversary and whether Obama has seen Letterman naked (he hasn’t, and he’d prefer to “keep it that way”).

Way back in 1960, John F. Kennedy became the first presidential candidate to take his campaign to late night, on the Jack Paar incarnation of The Tonight Show. Things were very, very different then.

Watching it now, the interview is almost hilarious in its formality, which is convenient, considering that’s the only hilarious thing about it. To his credit, Paar—a seminal figure in television history—makes a brief attempt at humor. “Have any amusing things happened to you since you’ve been campaigning, that you could tell me about in…30 seconds?” he asks the senator. “I was made an honorary Indian,” JFK offers somewhat inexplicably, to crickets.

Paar then turns to the studio audience for a Q&A session that dives deep into the finer points of Kennedy’s platform, including tensions with the Soviet Union and Cuba. This isn’t entertainment; it’s a stump speech.

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On Aug. 25 of the same year—just a month before the first televised presidential debate in American history—Jack Paar took The Tonight Show to Washington to interview Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent, and second lady Pat. Video footage can’t be found online, although there are transcripts of their conversation. Though the segment’s not without the occasional anecdote (the vice president reveals he was once forced to borrow a tuxedo from a newspaperman before a dinner with the queen), the emphasis is clearly on gravity over levity. Paar and Nixon talked segregation, low voter registration and the role of the United Nations in the Congo. As a nation, we were still a long way from asking political leaders to “Slow Jam the News.”

But the seeds of the irreverent presidential interviews we enjoy today were sown. Long before Governor Bill Clinton busted out his saxophone for a rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” on The Arsenio Hall Show on the 1992 campaign trail, Nixon reunited with Paar in 1963 to goofily showcase his own musical chops—and maybe even to reshape the way we thought our statesmen should behave on television.

The former Tonight Show host had handed over the reins of the NBC staple to Johnny Carson in 1962, and was by then serving as ringmaster of The Jack Paar Program (which, ironically, aired immediately after That Was the Week That Was, hosted by David Frost—as in, Frost/Nixon David Frost) on the same network. Nixon visited the show after losing both to Kennedy in 1960 and, humiliatingly, to Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. Only months before this interview, he’d notoriously informed the press that they “[wouldn’t] have Nixon to kick around anymore.” So this is probably the most charming you’ll ever see the 37th president, because at this point, he didn’t have any more fucks left to give.

After offering Paar some uncharacteristically casual and friendly banter (again, this is Dick “Not a Crook” Nixon we’re talking about), he performed a “hinky dink” piano concerto he wrote himself. It was actually pretty good.