How important is it for the president to be entertaining?
I ask because, apparently, I licked some old postage stamps that were doused in LSD, and I’m now stuck in a bad trip in which the entire nation is considering handing the keys to the White House to a reality show host. (Not the one from Alaska who looks like Tina Fey. A different one.)
The sea monsters who have taught themselves English, and have assumed the forms of people I know, tell me that they are voting for the reality show host, in part, because he’d make an “entertaining president.”
(In the universe in which this trip takes place, the election apparently involves a talent competition.)
JFK looked pretty on camera and went on to win the presidency. Ronald Regan was a movie star. And Bill Clinton played the saxophone on Arsenio Hall, before going on to have a few very entertaining sex scandals.
But it never occurred to me—until the sea monsters impersonating humans mentioned it—that amusing the masses was actually part of the president’s job.
It’s not important what the president does (or doesn’t do), just so long as the most powerful human on the planet says things that make us laugh. I guess I should have figured this out before.
After all, when Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on talk shows, the media dubbed him “Entertainer-In-Chief.” Time and again, he’s lived up to the title.
When Obama’s comment, “I have no more campaigns to run” during a state of the union address was met with unbridled hollers of joy from Republicans, he answered with a drop-the-mic quip: “I know because I won both of them.”
I know, because it’s the only thing I remember from that state of the union address, which I think makes me just as guilty as the soul-snatching sea monsters. I want my president to be funny. I want my leader to appear on Saturday Night Live and do some self-deprecating song and dance number. I want the president to cut it up with Seinfeld on “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” and sit between two ferns with Zach Galifianakis.
That said, I tried to explain to the brain-sucking sea monsters that there is a difference between a person who can tell jokes and a person who is a joke. But every time I open my mouth to speak, a string of words come out in a logical and persuasive sequence that makes the sea monsters scared and run away.
I’ve never tripped before, so I have no idea how long this will last. I just hope it’s all over by November. Because as interesting as it’s been to witness this great nation seriously consider electing to office a narcissistic reality star, I can tell you, I’m not the least bit entertained.
Mayrav Saar is a writer based in Los Angeles. Send all your angry letters there, sea monsters.
Mayrav, thank you so much for writing this entertaining piece about the difference between being a joke and telling a joke. I am in the same situation you are: it has to be an awful hallucination, a really bad trip, to witness a great number of humans turn into sea monsters, or worse, and think that a narcissistic huckster should be elected the leader of the free world. Is this the person who we could ever rely on to do the right thing for America or will he instead do whatever he thinks will get him more money? Again, thank you for being rational during this season of insanity.