I'm sure that anyone who reads my column regularly is probably tired of me drawing parallels between political events and the television show The West Wing but sometimes the temptation is just too strong.
So, I ask your indulgence because really I can't resist.
So the episode is called Seventeen People and the part of the plot that interests me is an aside to the main story in which one of the staff finds out that the President has multiple sclerosis and that he hid his illness during the presidential campaign. The majority of the staffers have been called together to work on the President's speech for the White House Correspondent's dinner... a dinner that President Obama recently described as: "the night when Washington celebrates itself."
The staffers are "rescuing" a script that had been written by some junior colleagues. The problem with the script is that "the writers forgot to bring the funny."
Donna, the wry administrative assistant suggests that the speech is so bad that the audience might heckle the President... The repartee goes like this:
JOSH: What are you doing?
DONNA: I'm jotting down some go-tos in case a joke doesn't work. "I haven't seen an audience this dead since..." That kind of thing.
JOSH: You think the President's gonna get heckled?
DONNA: No, but I've read the speech and I think you'd be wise to have some dead audience metaphors in your pocket.
JOSH: Okay, here we go. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very happy to be here. And I want to thank the White House Correspondents Association for inviting me. I expect I'll be stuck here tonight with my fair share of verbal harpoons. I don't mind, just don't stick me...[less enthusiasm with every word] with... the... dinner check." Wow.
DONNA: And then it says here, "Allow for laughter."
JOSH: Yeah, well, unless we give that instruction to the audience I don't think it's going to be a problem."
I was particularly drawn to this episode because President Obama's speech at the recent dinner was funny - very funny. Even if you don't share the sentiments he expressed the delivery and the savvy observations were smart and creativity presented.
As I watched Obama's speech I was reminded of a joke....
A neurosurgeon and a writer are at a party and the neurosurgeon asks the writer, "So what do you do?" "I'm a writer," she says.
"What do you do?" she retorts.
"I'm a neurosurgeon."
After a brief pause the neurosurgeon says, "When I retire I think I am going to take up writing."
"Funny", says the writer, "when I retire I was thinking of taking up neurosurgery."
The point of this joke is that writing is a skill. It requires dedication and hard work.
Writers work on their craft and the truth is that not everyone can craft a joke. Speech writers know that they must be aware of the oratory sills of the presenter and they must know the audience. The choice of subject, the use of crass language and the level of innuendo that the audience can handle needs to be crafted and tested and carefully considered.
It was obvious that the Obama speech writers decided not to step over the line when they wrote his opening joke.
President Obama started his speech by telling his listeners that when his aides asked him whether he had a bucket list of "must dos" before his presidency ended, he answered: "Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list." The writer let the audience figure out the joke.
So when Elizabeth May stepped up to the podium at the Press Gallery Dinner and dropped the f*** bomb into the room while at the same time insulting the entire cabinet one cannot help but to ask: "Who forgot the funny?"
Like the neurosurgeon, Elizabeth May seems to have forgotten that writing is a craft. She did apologize. She said she was trying to be "funny and edgy... and it didn't work."
But this is a slip up that needs to be blamed on her entire team.
A great deal of time has been spent trying to bring legitimacy to the Green Party's place in the Canadian political scene. May's leadership is critical now. The Green Party "wants in" and they have to be seen as something more than a fringe party. They really had an obligation "to bring the funny".
