Daddy Dearest Duz Dinner

Pretendident Baracko Bama donned dinner jacket and deigned to dine with the Lesser Minions of the Lamestream Media on the eve of the Eve of his Destruction, Fucked Up Father’s Day.  Of course, according to Barack Oedipal, all fathers are fucked up, except him, and those willing to be “fathered” by him.  Thus, every freakin’ year, men have to be preached to about their shortcomings as parents by the man who sits at the right hand of the father he invented as a child, then re-invented as an adult, who he continues to mold, shape and reconfigure into an entity worthy of being worshiped by him.  I’m not a guy and it pisses me off.  Who the hell are you, O Father Where Art Thou, to be ragging on manhood as if children were raising themselves under the inadequate supervision of incompetent, unqualified minor beings, i.e., girlz, until you came along in full Mighty Mouse mode to save the friggin’ day?  I hate to break it to you, Little Orphan Barry, nobody gives a flying flip about the  abandonment issues inflicted upon you by the paternal parental unit you only know in your dreams.  It ain’t our fault you’re black.

You’re not very funny, either Barko.  Besides the fact that you have to snicker at your own “jokes” to cue a friendly audience as to when it’s okay to laugh, you committed a couple of other comedic sins, on top of the bad “jokes” during your “performance” at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner last night.

The kind of ”events” like the one Obiteme attended, that invite celebrities and politicians to speak, and have a reasonable expectation that they’ll show up, are not, on the whole, a whole lot different than any other self-congratulatory corporate or charity shindig employees and volunteers are forced to endure in auditoriums, church basements and hotel ballrooms around the world on a regularly scheduled, mandatory basis.  Like any other retirement party, or company dinner, or team award presentation, or social club bash, there’s always a dais, where at some point in the evening, some dour honcho of some sort in a rented tux, is expected to take the mic and make like Shecky Rickles or somebody with a sense of humor.   These “events” are always expected to assume the air of a Friars Club roast, complete with good-natured ribbing at the expense of hapless underlings.

The problem is, none of these people ever have a clue of what it takes to do it right.  All too often, the “humor” ends up consisting of a series of  mean-spirited jibes, eliciting only obligatory forced laughter.  Barry “Dice” Obama is no exception.

No comedian worth his or her salt, and trust me, I’ve known a few, (how, who, and when is none of your business; let’s just say I had a wild, misspent youth) would ever make the kind of faux pas (as opposed to five paws) that Obie did, and most folks in the same situation always do.  There are roolz, ya know.

First of all, there’s a difference between attacking and kidding.  Audiences are never to be attacked, unless of course they start it.  A heckler hellbent on disrupting the show is fair game, and, again, any comedian worth his or her salt will unleash a torrent of verbal assaults upon the ass of anyone so brazen.  Likewise, an indifferent audience, more preoccupied with themselves than with the show, will meet a similar fate.  No comic likes to “bomb,” and will let you know it in no uncertain terms.  “What is this, an audience or an oil painting?”  “If you guys ever get another opportunity to get together as a group, pass it up” are pretty standard lines for such a situation.

But, you never attack your audience unprovoked.  What’s the point of that?  The only people who can get away with stuff like that are, well, the freaking pretendident, or, your boss, or somebody else upon whose good graces you depend.  Otherwise, anybody who does such a thing is toast.

So, of course you know, the first thing Waffles did was…you guessed it, attack the audience, putting them down for not being “A-listers.”  Though he did at one point credit the media fluffers in attendance for making him a celebrity, even that was the punchline to a joke about them not being on the level of the “real journalists” he had addressed a few weeks ago.  From a pretty good critique of the event:

President Obama in his speech to the RTCA got right to the heart of Washington’s journalist dinner rivalry, saying he was on hand to “Tell jokes that weren’t funny enough for me to use when we did this five weeks ago,” at the White House Correspondents’ dinner (known as the Senior Prom to the RTCA’s Junior Prom.) Then again, he said, twisting the knife deeper: “The jokes may not be as good but neither is the guest list.”

And later: “I think your programming is more relevant than ever before — at least that’s the impression that I get when I read the blogs.”

Oh. My. How. Funny.  The rest if the performance was equally underwhelming, with one “joke”about Richard Holbrooke spraying WD-40 in the garage causing Hillary Clinton to fall and break her elbow winning my award for Most Incomprehensibly Stupid.  Believe me, the competition for that award was fierce.  The follow-up line about breaking news on the healthcare front being that Clinton’s not gonna sue, and the knee slapper about rolling over in bed and asking Brian Williams for advice are but two of the honorable mentions that spring to mind off the top of my head.  I’m not gonna list any more because, as much as I love you guys, I wouldn’t sit through that happy crappy again under threat of waterboarding in Iran.