Right to the point: The reason the talk shows and “Saturday Night Live” haven’t made fun of Obama much isn’t that they’re all liberals who can’t stand to make jokes about their guy. It’s that Obama hasn’t given them much to grab on to.

Bill Clinton was a gift to comedians: overweight, Southern, and promiscuous. It didn’t matter that the writers and performers generally supported him politically. A joke is a joke, and Clinton gave them plenty of material. Likewise, you had Al Gore the stiff robot, followed by Al Gore the environmental crusader. There’s always been Ted Kennedy the fat drunk. Meanwhile, plenty of Republican politicians have gone unscathed simply because they weren’t colorful enough to make fun of.

Most of the political humor on these shows isn’t really about politics. It’s about personalities and appearances. Think back to Dana Carvey’s legendary portrayal of George Bush on “SNL.” Did it have anything to do with the president’s policies? Nope. In fact, all there really was to it was a repetition of some of his catchphrases and a vaguely accurate impersonation of his voice. They were lucky they had Carvey, who could latch on to those things and run with them.

Obama is more problematic. As far as his speech goes, he says “uh” a lot, but that’s not much to go on. His voice and delivery are not marked by a particular accent or style. “SNL” has Fred Armisen playing him, but he’s not very good at it yet. He hasn’t found his “wouldn’t be prudent” or “not gonna do it,” to name Carvey’s main Bush-impersonating tools.

Continue reading…

The popularity of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” featured in this week’s edition of Eric’s Bad Movies at Film.com, baffles me. This movie is not scary. It is barely even suspenseful. All four main characters behave stupidly for most of the film, not enough of them die, and one of them who does, does it offscreen. Nonetheless, it is one of the more financially successful films to be featured in Eric’s Bad Movies, so I suspect it will have its defenders, particularly among those who saw it as teenagers and have not seen it since then.

I guess I stumped everyone with my clue last week: “Next week’s movie, also a horror flick, features an actor who would later play a famous real-life outlaw on a TV series.” I was referring to Muse Watson, who plays the hook-wielding killer in this film and went on to play airplane-hijacker D.B. Cooper on “Prison Break.” (My follow-up clue referred to him as a “stealer of money,” which is probably somewhat misleading. The money he made off with was ransom given to him by the government, which technically means it was extorted, not stolen. Sorry about that.)

Next week’s film is a horror sequel from the mid 1980s. Normally I would just do the original film, not the sequel, but the original is actually pretty decent. Besides, the sequel has a title that literally makes me laugh out loud: “[Blank] II: [Hilarious subtitle].” I haven’t watched it yet, so I’m not sure if the subtitle actually appears onscreen, or if it’s just “[Blank] II.” Anyway, it’s listed the hilarious way at IMDB, and it stars a man who also appeared in not one but two hugely successful film franchises. Is that enough to go on?