WASHINGTON — As he took the podium at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in 2014, President Obama was near a low point in his presidency: The rollout of the Obamacare exchanges had not gone well, details of an electronic eavesdropping operation had been leaked to the world, and his poll numbers were near an all-time low.
"I usually start these dinners with a few self-deprecating jokes," Obama said. "After my stellar 2013, what could I possibly talk about?”
Obama wasn't the first president to use some version of that joke. After he famously flubbed a press conference question in 2004 about whether he had made any mistakes as president, George W. Bush led off with, “I was going to start off tonight telling some self-deprecating jokes. But then I couldn’t think of any mistakes I had made to be self-deprecating about."
Those transparent attempts to be self-deprecating — without actually saying anything negative — reveal an under-appreciated purpose of the president's annual stand-up routine: Comedy can be a powerful rhetorical tool for deflating opponents, disarming critics and defusing controversy.
Obama takes the stage Saturday night for his last correspondents' dinner in the midst of a a campaign to elect his successor, giving him ample opportunity to joke about his legacy, the 2016 election, and — more than likely — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
"This is one unique opportunity that he has every year to poke a little fun at himself, poke a little fun at the process, maybe even poke a little fun at a political adversary or two," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Friday. "But it's also a reminder of how in one way or another, we all have a role to play in our democracy."
Trump isn't attending this year, but Earnest hinted that "I don't think that ducking the room means that you are going to avoid some attention in the speeches."
The correspondents dinner has become a celebrity-fueled self-important affair — "the night when Washington celebrates itself," as Obama said last year — but the audience has also grown to include viewers on C-SPAN and millions more through viral snippets of presidential monologue. Over the last few decades, that's transformed the event from a few insider jokes into its own culture-defining moment.
The annual dinner started under President Coolidge with some light entertainment, but it was President Kennedy who first transformed his remarks into a stand-up style monologue, and presidents quickly learned to use the dinner as a way to acknowledge subjects in a way they couldn't in a more official setting.
"It is a privilege to be here at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I suppose I should say it is an executive privilege," President Nixon joked in 1973, as the Watergate scandal mounted.
After Nixon resigned, President Ford told the correspondents that the White House would get a routine repainting. "It is done for reasons of maintenance, aesthetics, and appearance," he said. "So please, would you just refer to this as a paint job, not a coverup?"
But it was President Clinton who really understood the value of the comedy to deflect scandal, using the dinner to make fun of fundraising controversies and even his affair with a White House intern. In 1999, Clinton registered a mock complaint that "the events of the past year" came in only 53rd on a list of the 100 biggest stories of the 20th century.
"I mean, what does a guy have to do to make the top 50 around here? I came in six places after the invention of plastic, for crying out loud. And I don't recall a year of 24-hour-a-day saturation coverage on the miracle of plastic," he said.
That's a classic use of what scholars of rhetoric call an enthymeme — an argument in which one of the premises remains unstated.
"He didn’t actually name the scandal," said Don Waisanen, a professor of public communication at the City University of New York. "He didn’t talk about the details. He certainly didn’t use the name 'Monica Lewinsky.' The audience had to come up with what he was talking about."
In a journal article in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Waisanen analyzed a century's worth of correspondents' dinner speeches and found that presidents increasingly use that rhetorical device to "joke about the smoke but not the fire."
That was the approach of Mark Katz, a former Clinton speechwriter who now consults for Soundbite Institute. And there's an art to telling those jokes in a way brings the audience in on it.
"The reason why the White House Correspondents' Dinner is so great is that it's the one day of the year where the subtext gets spoken," Katz said. "Part of the joke is that me knowing that you have a piece of information in your brain, and building a sentence that allows you to use that information to unlock the joke."
During the Clinton administration, he said, the two biggest speeches the president gave each year were the State of the Union Address and the White House correspondents' dinner.
Comedy can go bad. President George W. Bush, at a separate dinner of radio and television correspondents, joked about looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction — missing from an Iraq he had just invaded — under furniture in the White House.
The made-up controversies over his birthplace and religion have been the unstated premise of many of Obama's jokes.
"“It's been quite a year since I've spoken here last, lots of ups, lots of downs, except for my approval ratings, which have just gone down," he said in 2010. "But that's politics. It doesn't bother me. Besides, I happen to know that my approval ratings are still very high in the country of my birth.”
"These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be," he said in 2013.
But while Obama has used humor to advance a policy agenda — think his "Between Two Ferns" interview to promote Obamacare in 2014 — that's not the goal of the correspondents' dinner, speechwriters say.
"The number one, two and three goals of the speech are to be funny," said David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter who anchored his White House Correspondents' Dinner speeches from 2012 to 2015. "If something goes viral, or is there's some truth telling that gets done, that's great."
Litt, now the head writer at Funny or Die D.C., said most of Obama's jokes are aimed at himself. "There's something very charming and very American about the idea that the most powerful person in the country doesn't take himself too seriously, even if he take the job seriously," Litt said. "He remains the president, even though he's telling a joke."
