As Al Gore discovered, your political loss can be your media career’s gain. John Edwards appeared on The Colbert Report—along with current candidates Clinton and Obama—and he absolutely killed. (At last, the voice of the white man is heard!) There is a limit to how laugh-out-loud funny an active candidate can be: you can be wry, or self-deprecating, or maybe sarcastic, but there are built-in limits to how much fun you can have with your image, and the line between joke and gaffe is too treacherous.
Edwards, on the other hand, was free to be funny. The details, and Clinton and Obama’s videos, after the jump:
The former candidate delivered a Wørd—or rather, EdWørd—segment that made some actual political points while poking fun at his trial-lawyer background, his hair, his auditioning of the candidates for his endorsement, and the number of times he has said that his father was a millworker. (A virtual balloon drop celebrated his 1,000,000th mention.) And he set out the price of his endorsement—a Jet-Ski, no, wait, two—while laying out the pros and cons of the choice: “On the one hand, I don’t want to be seen as anti-hope. On the other hand, I don’t want James Carville to bite me.”
Clinton and Obama, on the other hand—meh. I thought Hillary’s bit was a little funnier, playing off her campaign’s message of competence by fixing Colbert’s video screen. As she’s shown on Letterman, she has a decent deadpan delivery, and—as the contrast with Obama showed—it’s easier to be funny in person than by satellite remote. (Witness, for instance, most of Bill Maher’s big-screen interviews on Real Time.)
Obama, meanwhile—in front of what seems like a rampantly ‘bamaphile audience—got off a fair tweak on his message of the day by putting media “distractions” on the On Notice board. (Obama, by the way, was just booked on The Daily Show for Monday.)
But with both Clinton and Obama, you could feel the potential for humor being reined in by the demands of the campaign. Both of them, when it came down to it, were just delivering their campaign messages—Clinton’s appeal to pragmatism, Obama’s argument against politics-as-usual—in joke form. Electoral need just puts a damper on comedy. (Even naturally funny politicians—like the darkly sardonic Bob Dole—need to rein it in on the campaign trail.)
Sooner or later, either Hillary or Barack will become the nominee, and may even become President. The other will be free to actually be funny again. In that sense, John Edwards has already won.