He’s hitting the road, working on new material, coming soon to a city near you.

He’s Barack Obama, stand-up president. Politics, particularly Republican presidential politics, has gotten ridiculous, he thinks. These people aren’t serious enough to be president in Obama’s mind, and he’s got the platform to lay into them, and the natural sarcastic sense of humor to fit the role.


“You've got to spend a lot of time dealing with some strange characters who behave like they're on a reality TV show," Obama told Kanye West in a mock warning about his announced plans to run for president, after the rapper appeared ahead of him at a San Francisco fundraiser in October.

“If you went to 100 doctors, and 99 of them said you are really sick, you’ve got, let’s say, high cholesterol — what would you do? Would you say those 99 doctors are crazy and part of a wild-eyed socialist plot to prevent you from eating cheese?” he said a few weeks later at another event, in the latest version of a line he’d workshopped a few times to knock the Republican presidential candidates’ responses on climate change. “Or would you say, ‘You know what, I’ll bet those doctors know what they’re talking about; I’ve got to modify my diet a little bit.’ ”

He’s quoting Chris Rock, twisting his mouth into an exaggerated pout for a POTUS-style Grumpy Cat to mock the “gloomy” Republicans, and cracking himself up in the bit that got the attention this week about the Republicans saying they can handle Putin when they’re not tough enough for CNBC debate moderators.

“I mean, let me tell you, if you can't handle those guys,” Obama said, “you know, then I don't think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you.”

All this helps keep him in the center of the political conversation well past the point when by all rights he should have been lameducked, but it’s more than that: To all the Republicans who used to hit him for not being up to the job of president himself, Obama’s delivering a wry 'well, get a load of these guys.'

That it drives Republicans crazy — well, that’s just an added bonus.

The Republicans fume — this just shows how divisive Obama is, Fox News host Sean Hannity raged Tuesday night after Obama mocked the Republicans for whining about the treatment they got from the CNBC moderators at last week’s debate.

Obama’s “good with ad libs,” Donald Trump quipped in a separate appearance on "Fox & Friends," But, he said, he “has done a terrible job as president.”

For all that’s been made of Obama’s not-so-great poll numbers, they’re inching up again. He’s already more popular among Democrats than any of the Democrats running to replace him, and more popular among voters overall than those three — or any of the Republicans.

The president’s rolling his eyes, people who know him say, and he’s pretty sure a lot of people are rolling right along with him. Clearly, he feels that with a little tweak or two, he can be the one who can turn straight news coverage of the latest GOP flareup into coverage of their campaign as a silly food fight.

According to people who know, most of the lines that have broken through are ones that he’s come up with himself, many of them on the fly. "It's not like there's a joke factory that's feeding him one-liners," said one person close to the White House.

At fundraisers and other political events all campaign season long, there will be plenty more opportunities for jokes, though Obama’s not working off a script or planned comic build-up. Part of Obama’s role in the coming presidential election will be to rally Democrats together, part will be to help turn out the coalition that helped elect him in 2008 and 2012, say people familiar with the planning.

But another part will be to rip at Republicans like this, in a way that Hillary Clinton and the other Democrats running can’t because they would risk a different type of backlash, and because they’re just not funny in the same kind of way.

Obama, comedian-in-chief President Obama tries out a few jokes about the 2016 republican contenders during various speeches. Video produced by Beatrice Peterson.

Obama’s in his element, and freer these days to let loose the biting jokes that almost anyone who’s spent time with him in private has come to know well, but that until lately was much rarer in public or pre-boiled down into dad joke groaners. Obama piling on the insults with Zach Galifianakis in his “Between Two Ferns” Obamacare video last year didn’t take a lot of acting, according to people who know him and were involved in the video.

Even John Boehner, just hours after his resignation was officially read out on the House floor on Monday, got a jab while the president was trying to compliment him for getting a budget deal done.

It’s like that old Chris Rock bit, Obama said, when men brag about saying, “‘I take care of my kids.’ I mean, you're supposed to take care of your kids. ‘I haven't been to jail.’ You're not supposed to go to jail.”

Obama has been frustrated by the lack of credit he gets for how much the economy has improved since he first was elected president, and some White House advisers feel that as the election to choose his successor really gets underway, he’s uniquely positioned to remind Americans about where things were and where they are now.

“According to this alternative reality that they have created, everything was great until I took office,” Obama said Wednesday night at another DNC fundraiser in one Washington suburb, speaking of the Republicans. “And those were the golden years when we were losing 800,000 jobs, and millions of people were losing their homes, and we were in the middle of two wars, and I came in and just screwed everything up.”

There’s a little bit of underlying personal resentment too. The lead-in to his CNBC jab, after all, was, “Have you noticed that every one of these candidates say, ‘Obama is weak’? ‘Putin is kicking sand in his face.’”

Naturally, this all builds up more resentment among his opponents.

“Now Obama mocks us — CONSERVATIVES — for standing up to CNBC?” Republican candidate Rick Santorum wrote in a fundraising letter out Thursday morning. “Give me a break! He doesn’t have the guts to appear with Sean Hannity or Mark Levin, let alone take on radical leaders!”

Meanwhile, over on Comedy Central’s “The Nightly Show,” Larry Wilmore ran a tape of Obama making the CNBC joke under a chyron, identifying him as the new Senior Republican Burn Correspondent.

“The president is funny, man. He is hilarious,” Wilmore said, following the clip. “Kind of doing my job.”

This article tagged under: White House

Barack Obama