Stand-up comedians in the Age of Reagan
At the dawn of the Decade of Greed LA's comics didn't think President Reagan was that funny -- even after he was shot.
In the early 1980s the editor of the LA Times’ Sunday Calendar section, the great Irv Letofsky, sent me out into the comedy clubs to see how President Reagan was registering on the laugher curve. Many of the jokes I heard in those unwoke days — long before Jay Leno replaced Johnny Carson — would get their tellers canceled today. Most of the jokes weren’t very funny, either.
Los Angeles Times
Now that President Reagan has come out for prayer in the schools," comedian Argus Hamilton quips, "school kids finally have a recourse they can ask God for a hot lunch."
"Nancy Reagan," comic Jay Leno snipes, "thinks the Third World is J.C. Penney's."
Welcome to Ronald Reagan humor.
You'd think America would be knee-deep in Reagan jokes. After all, the President's done a fair job of supplying the laugh sector with raw material. So has Nancy.
Long before Interior Secretary James G. Watt rode into view, Reagan's age, former occupation and some slightly embarrassing political soul brothers among the Moral Majority crowd were ready-made jokes.
Then came the Laffer Curve, David Stockman, Nancy's china policy and projected budget deficits in numbers that even Carl Sagan couldn't explain.
Reagan's a juicy target. The media and his opponents have characterized him as insensitive to the needs of the poor and soft on country-clubism.
I would have bet that stand-up comedians would be sticking it to the President as mercilessly as they could. But they aren't. Except for Leno and Hamilton, most of Los Angeles' comics don't seem to think Reagan and his Administration are very funny at all.
In fact, if my recent four-night survey of several top comedy clubs means anything, comedians from the well-known to the unknown wring more humor from McDonald's' Mac-omania, blind dates and the perils of low-fare airlines than they do from Washington.
In four hours on a Thursday night at the Improv, I heard only one of nine comedians (Leno) mention Reagan's name.
Leno announced that the President had pardoned John Hinckley after telling Hinckley that "Kadafi was sleeping with Jodie Foster."
And he opened his act by reporting that "Reagan cut off funds to blind people today. It's about time we cracked down on those deadbeats," he sneered. "You mean there's no night work they could be doing?"
Reagan humor was more prevalent at the Comedy Store, where "Real People's" Skip Stephenson hit on the First Family's sex lives.
Stephenson's raunchy remarks drew laughs, as did his comment that "If Nancy has one more facelift her eyes will be in the back of her head."
He also claimed that Ronald Reagan looks like the Big Boy statue, which prepared the audience for Richard Belzer, the night's headliner, who said Reagan's face looks like roast beef.
But Argus Hamilton, a politically minded Methodist preacher's son from Oklahoma, a place where he says they consider Billy Carter "a major intellectual," presented by far the most Reagan material.
His targets included Mike Curb, Jerry Brown and the man "who made 200 million Americans miss Jimmy Carter," the same man Jay Leno says makes "Jimmy Carter look like Socrates."
"I enjoyed hearing President Reagan's weekly radio broadcast," Hamilton said with a slight drawl. "I think they should call it 'The Poolside Chat.' I enjoyed hearing how he wished all the poor the best of luck, as Amway distributors."
Hamilton said Reaganomics really scares the minorities: "For instance, what's he going to do to help black unemployment? Expand the National Basketball Association to a thousand teams?"
He tried to put Reagan's proposed budget into perspective: "A $110-billion budget deficit. Do you know how much money that is? It's a dollar for every star in the Milky Way, $25 for every person on this planet, and it's $10 over Nancy's credit-card limit."
He explained the New Federalism — "If Kansas wants to attack El Salvador it's OK" — and had something good to say about America's commander in chief:
"As soon as he took the oath of office, Iran let 52 hostages come home. Iranians understand Reagan and what he would have done. He would have sent Monty Hall to make 'em a deal: 'You can keep the Americans or trade it for what's aboard the B-52s. Door No. 1 or door No. 2? How about Slim Pickens to block?" "
At the Improv, Elayne Boosler worked her way through such topics as illegal aliens, cars and living alone before striking unemployment ("It's easing up — two Jews got a job in Ohio").
Then came James Watt ("They made him secretary of the Interior because he had never been out of doors") and the human life amendment ("The fetus becomes a human as soon as you light up a cigarette").
Boosler said Reagan was so lousy at math that "he should have to show all his work on a separate piece of paper." She told her Hinckley joke, saying that the predominantly black jury was going to let Hinckley go “and tell him to get it right next time."
(It didn't elicit much laughter and, as Boosler acknowledged after her act, her political material, in general, didn't exactly have them rolling in the aisles. At one point, after a Watt line evoked mostly silence, Boosler asked if "anyone had read the paper today?")
The quiet reaction to Boosler 's Hinckley joke bore out something that Hamilton said in an interview about Reagan and how the public perceives him:
"You could say something vicious about Carter and Nixon, but not Ford or Reagan. Reagan forces a comic to think hard about what an audience will laugh at. There's something about Reagan that makes you want to be fair with him."
Maybe so, but Reagan's still good for some laughs.
During his sustained attack on Reagan at the Comedy Store, Hamilton noted that the President saw to it that Europe has the neutron bomb:
"Reagan, being a Californian, can relate to the neutron bomb because it only kills people; it spares our patio furniture."
And, after referring to Brezhnev and Reagan's ages, he admitted that, like the Russians, he was afraid of Reagan:
"Nothing scares me like an 80-year-old man who's willing to die for his country."
There aren't too many Reagan jokes in the air now, but be patient. It took more than six years for the funniest line of the Nixon Administration to turn up — though it was no comedian who delivered "I am not a crook."