Does it shock you to learn that this man finds dick jokes funny?
Of course not! That is the face of a man who’s just let a wang gag fly and felt it land.
Then it might also not shock you to learn that President Barack Obama came very, very close to telling a dick joke at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
David Litt, one of Obama’s former speechwriters, has a new book out. Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years is an inside look into the machinations of American politics from the point of view of someone whose job it was to make that palatable.
Vulture published an excerpt that shows how perilously close Obama came to making a dick joke at the annual dinner, referencing his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father.
The excerpt also references former speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, who these days can be found dissecting U.S. politics on a number of Crooked Media podcasts.
Litt writes:
Jon Lovett returned from Los Angeles for the dinner that year, and on the morning of April 29, he, Favs, and I did one final run-through in the Oval. By now the script was nearly final. In fact, we had only one new line to run by President Obama. During a recent speech, Vice President Biden had remarked that POTUS had a “big stick.” He was referring to foreign policy, but his hand gesture was, to put it mildly, undiplomatic. Jeff Nussbaum pounced.
“Let’s just put it this way,” read his joke. “Dreams aren’t the only thing I got from my father.”
POTUS laughed so loudly that I secretly hoped he would add the line to the script. But this was an election year; a presidential dick joke was a bridge too far.
We miss you.
