Cracking Obama jokes: Why can nobody seem to manage it?

No one loses weight on the campaign trail, when you’re grabbing fast food and eating whatever is offered out of politeness, but this guy is always turning down doughnuts. It’s like he signed up for running for president because he thought “president” was some kind of 10K race.

As comedian Aisha Tyler told me, “He has the build of an ex-high school javelin thrower. He’s the guy on the track team who only does that one event, and he weighs the same as the javelin.”

He’s effete

He’s well-dressed. He eats arugula — which he buys at Whole Foods. He mocks those who use guns. He is, as we mentioned, quite thin. He may only be half-black, but he’s three-quarters gay.

He called his own

grandmother a racist

We all have racist grandmothers, but we don’t brag about it to everyone. I like to imagine that his granny wasn’t that bad and that Obama was just super-sensitive. Like she would tell him it was bedtime and he would yell, “Oh, I have to go to bed because I’m black!” Or she would tell him to clean up his room and he would start yelling, “Oh, clean my room, huh? My people stopped obeying the white woman 100 years ago, Grammy!” Then they both would laugh and she would whip him.

His name is weird

The unfunny people beat us to the Osama/Obama bit, which really could have been mined. But Obama also dropped the “Barry” nickname in college. Do you remember those classmates who suddenly found their culture and had to share it with you like they were on the ninth step of AA? You just wanted to trudge through “Portrait of a Lady,” but they felt compelled to sit you down in the dorm hallway and explain how they’re no longer Susie, they’re Mei Mei now. Then they recounted their whole journey of identity by using a lot of words that made it clear that Mei Mei was going to be a lot less fun than Susie was.

His platitudes need deconstruction

“We are the people we’ve been waiting for”? Actually, I’m pretty sure we’re the people who put all our money in Yahoo and then bought a house to flip and now are hocking everything we have. We’re the people China has been waiting for.

Stein is a columnist for the Times. E-mail him at jstein@latimescolumnists.com

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