SFist Reviews: The Second Annual Bush Going Away Party
As we said earlier, making jokes about the President is easy. Making funny jokes isn't. Far too many comedians take the lazy way out and just resort to "George W. Bush is stupid" lines. Yeah, there might some truth to it and yeah, it's kind of liberating to say, but it's just not very witty or clever. As a result, a lot of political humor these days is way more rant than joke. And ranting is hardly ever as funny.
The Second Annual George Bush Going Away Party comedy event on Saturday showed the difficulties in political humor. Especially political humor in San Franciso, where saying "Bush sucks" is greeted with the same sort of vigorous acknowledgement as saying "Yankees suck!" in Boston. There were way too many punch lines that were pretty much along the lines of "Bush is stupid" or "Cheney is evi"" or "red state voters are dumb" all greeted with thunderous applause. And the audience, about what you’d expect at such an event-- middle aged hippies from Marin with "Visualize Peace" bumper- were ready for some serious playa hatin'. The audience cheered when somebody just said, "I hate SUVs."
Not that all of the jokes were clunkers, there were actually some good ones. The first comedian, Alana Devich, had a good bit where she compared W. as a contestant on "Jeopardy!" who gets every question wrong but still manages to win. That's a good line-- it's original, it's a clever way of saying "George is stupid," and actually does a pretty good job of summing up his rather amazing ability to, as somebody once said, "fail upward."
One of the problems was that some of the comedians didn't seem to be that political of comedians. The first two, Alana and Ross Turner, even admitted as much. Most of the stuff that we're guessing came from their normal acts was rather funny but the political stuff wasn't as sharp. We especially liked Ross Turner's bit about about the supposed Second Coming of Jesus. Another comedian, Diane Amos, did a great free-style spoken word poetry based on three words that came from the audience.
The only comedian who managed to succeed on all levels was the show closer, Bill Santiago. He threw out his political jokes early, all of which were definitely more clever than polemic (his variation on the "Bush is stupid" meme was of a couple of primates watching TV, being pissed because they realized just how little difference was there between them and us on the Evolutionary scale), but then went into what was probably his standard routine. And every single bit of it was majorly funny. Santiago, kind of a cross between a Latino Ben Stiller and Latino Kramer, was hilarious with his mixture of ethnic jokes and skewed takes on the world.
As we said, making good jokes at the President's expense isn't easy. We've seen comedians much more famous flail at it (ever sit through Bill Maher’s last HBO special?). And the audience ate it up. We didn’t.