President Obama and his "anger translator" Keegan-Michael Key, disrupting the social order.
Ancient Roman society had a special holiday each December called Saturnalia. Part Halloween, part Mardi Gras, and part April Fools, this holiday was a weeklong extravaganza of drunkenness, costumes, and revelry—but perhaps the most important aspect was the upheaval of traditional social order. Gambling, which was traditionally either outlawed or highly discouraged, was permitted. Slaves were allowed to wear the garments of the freeborn, and sat at the same table to eat and drink with their masters. They could even backtalk and lecture their owners, as long as they did so in the form of a good joke.
In short, it was an annual, highly anticipated party where for one day, the people who had to keep themselves in check the most got to say whatever they actually wanted to say, all in the guise of humor and a good time. And when the festival was over, all of society would wake up the next morning, revert back to traditional structure and decorum, and pretend the previous evening's events simply never took place.
American political society has an annual spring festival very similar to this: It's called the White House Correspondents' Dinner. More below the fold.
Ostensibly, the White House Correspondents' Dinner has historically been a social gala where the political elite and the press can have a jovial evening of inconsequential humor without the usual tension that must naturally exist among the people who make decisions, as well as those who are supposed to hold them accountable. These days, though, the purpose of the event seems to be something else entirely.
Whatever the tenor of the event may have been before, Stephen Colbert changed it with his famous roast in 2006. He lampooned both President George W. Bush and the media outlets that had essentially served as stenographers and rubber stamps for the administration's destructive economic and foreign policies. The only problem with Colbert's evisceration? It spoke far too much full-frontal truth for the media's liking. As Dan Froomkin wrote in the Washington Post at the time:
The traditional media's first reaction to satirist Stephen Colbert's uncomfortably harsh mockery of President Bush and the press corps at Saturday night's White House Correspondents Association dinner was largely to ignore it.
Instead, the coverage primarily focused on the much safer, self-deprecatory routine in which Bush humorously paired up with an impersonator playing his inner self.
The result, however, was a wave of indignation from the liberal side of the blogosphere over what some considered a willful disregard of the bigger story: That a captive, peevish president (and his media lapdogs) actually had to sit and listen as someone explained to them what they had done wrong; that the Bush Bubble was forcibly violated, right there on national television.
Colbert told everyone in the room exactly what they deserved to hear—but the way he did it made it completely obvious that he wasn't joking, which allowed the press to shrug off the routine as unfunny, indecorous, and inappropriate for the occasion, without delving into the merits of Colbert's content. Subsequent editions of the dinner have tried hard not to
cross that line.
But that also poses a problem, especially in today's political and journalistic environment. The cable "news" network with the highest ratings in America is a hyper-partisan propaganda network that pushes absurd conspiracy theories into the mainstream of political thought. The overwhelming scientific consensus of climate change, a fact that threatens our very existence on this planet, is being rejected on a purely partisan basis. And the opposition majorities in Congress have been so vitriolic and obstructionist that President Obama has to resort to issuing executive orders in order to accomplish much of anything. It's a political circumstance that calls for a truth-telling like what Stephen Colbert did nine years ago. But there are two problems: first, Obama is the president, not a comedian. And second, he has to make sure to maintain decorum of the evening by letting the media pretend it was all in good jest. It's the American political version of a Roman dinner during Saturnalia: say what you want, but let's all make sure we can tell each other the next morning that it was just a joke.
In this context, the most pointed part of the evening was the segment with "Luther," President Obama's anger translator. As Ezra Klein says:
This was, itself, a way of giving up the game. The Luther joke comes from the Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele, and the point of it is that Obama, as the first black president, is not allowed to express his anger, as America is terrified of angry black men. And so he's got Luther — the angry black man who can say what he can't.
President Obama and Keegan-Michael Key performed the latest incarnation of the skit, but with one key difference: Obama was playing himself. They used the gag to get in some hard-hitting jabs at the media, of course—and the jokes at the expense of Fox News and CNN were direct gut-punches, but with the brilliance of being allowable in the context of the skit. If the script had left it at that, it would have been poignant enough, but they saved the best for last (3:00 mark in the video):
At the end of the skit, President Obama get so angry discussing Republican intransigence on climate change that he scares his own "anger translator." It works very well as a joke, but the subtext is even more important. President Obama is simply not allowed to get angry in public This performance allows him to be as angry as he probably is about the issue and rant about it into a microphone in front of the capital's political and media elite, but all with the veneer of plausible deniability. You can't watch Obama's performance here without knowing intrinsically that he means it—but all while giving everyone in the room the ability to pretend it was all a good joke.
The White House Correspondents' Dinner is no longer just a #nerdprom. It may still be a gathering where out-of-touch political elites celebrate each other, but its purpose is now much greater. The current political context combines absurd extremism with a media environment that pretends otherwise, and the dinner is now a rare opportunity for the person most constrained by the principles of decorum and politesse to be honest about where things really stand—just as long as the punchlines are set up well. President Obama took that opportunity to make known his true feelings about climate change, and in so doing created the template for future presidents to live up to. And since conservative extremism and Fox News aren't going away anytime soon, there will be plenty of opportunities to do just that.