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Presidents are funny aren’t they, I mean the stuff they do, just like silly kittens on YouTube, what are they like, and it’s so ripe for comedy, isn’t it?
I mean if you can’t have a laugh at the President’s expense, what is the world coming to?
The guy is the leader of the FREE WORLD, for goodness sake, what better way to show we are also part of that free world than to make fun of the President?
Now I don’t know who the guy was, the guy that came up with the phrase ‘The Leader of the Free World’, my bet is that it was probably a former manager for the Heinz account at McCann Erickson, it was definitely a guy like that, wearing denim blue horn rims and a sharp grey pinstripe DB suit, a guy twenty years or more ahead of his time.
Borrowed by Deep State as a concepts manager Maxie Greenberg, or whoever it was, came up with the big one, Maxie invented the phrase, Leader of the Free World.
“Maxie, we got us too many presidents now, everybody is a president, every two bit company has a trailer full of them presidents, we even got vice-presidents, Maxie. Jeez, I’m telling ya these are the schmucks who just used to work the photo copier. It’s overused Maxie, it has no currency, we need something more, something bigger, what ya got?”
Maxie went home to his brownstone in leafy Gramercy Park, just a few miles from his old office on Madison Avenue, and over the next couple of days he worked through all the possibilities.
He kept coming back to the same thread, the Soviets, the pinko commie scum, they weren’t free were they?
Those other funny little, slanty eyed, commie rice gobblers, they were certainly not free.
They both had Presidents sure but these guys didn’t preside over free people, theirs was not a free world, no siree.
Then it hit him, bang, it him like a Mack truck barreling down I-20, our guy is the President of the Free World, no, no , not the President, too many Presidents already, oh for Chrissakes!
He’s the, the, uh, he’s the leader, the leader, the Leader of the Free World, I got it, I got it!
Indeed he got it and they loved it, they loved him and they loved it, the Leader of the Free World. This was so much better, way better than President, Maxie you did good.
It tells you subliminally that our world is free, not like theirs, not like the commies where everyone hides in the shadows and fears to speak, our world is free and who do we have to lead us?
Why hell boys, we got us the Leader of the Free World, we are back on top guys, we got us the Leader of the Free World. Guess we’ll have to call him Mister President but everyone knows he’s actually the Leader of the Free World, thanks Maxie.
Maxie, if indeed it was him, died in his late 80s, he died in his nice, sylvan 30 acre estate in Vermont, he died surrounded by his children, all his family and his wife. His wife, Candy was 42 years younger than Maxie and they met whilst he was on a cruise in the Bahamas, she was his cocktail waitress that day they met.
Even she never knew about Maxie’s greatest campaign, he could never speak about it, he never told a soul, he could never tell anyone his story of how he, Maxie Greenberg, coined the greatest advertising scam of all time.
The Leader of the Free World, rest in peace Maxie, and thanks.
Presidents are so funny, look at Tricky Dicky Nixon, old Tricky with his 5 o’clock shadow and his sweaty brow and his shifty eyes. You couldn’t trust old Tricky, he was so funny they actually managed to impeach him. Now that is funny, in retrospect people in recent administrations made his shit look like jaywalking but he was funny.
The best was yet to come though, Gerald Ford, Gerald and his alcoholic wife Betty, she was funny too, they named a rehab clinic after her. Don’t you worry about a thing Betty, just have another Martini. They were funny, a real treat for the satirists.
Gerald, it was said, was so uncoordinated he could not shit and chew gum at the same time, which actually was funny as indeed he couldn’t.
We had Ronnie, remember Ronnie Reagan, old turtle neck, old B movie actor Ronnie, how we laughed, I’m sure you remember The President’s Brain is Missing on Spitting Image. Nancy Reagan was quite funny too, remember how she used to check in with her spirit guide and she would tell Ronnie what days he should invade places, they were a dream for the comics.
George Bush was disappointing, old George that is, he never really gave anybody much to laugh about, he didn’t really try very hard until he vomited all over a Japanese Premier at a state lunch, it took a while but it was certainly worth waiting for.
His boy more than made up for that however, Dubya was everything his daddy could never be, Dubya was a bona fide idiot, the doors used to fall off his car and he squirted people with water from his oversize buttonhole, Dubya was a clown.
Dubya and his friends used to wait for people and then he and his gang would bomb their houses, blow up their countries and Saturday Night Live loved him and everybody did his John Wayne style voice.
Dubya was funny.
I’ve got a treat for you now, the new kid on the block, the Trumpster, a game show host but with proper money. Think the late Dale Winton but with a string of hotels and golf clubs. He’s got small hands, he’s properly orange and he has funny hair with a comb over, not sure if he’s funny enough on his own so we should probably also make him a racist.
Since lots of people voted for him and he seems to be doing OK he will have to be a funny racist, we’ve redefined him, a true Maxie Greenberg moment.
So there we have it ladies and germs, all the funny Presidents of the past 60 odd years, they were a real boon to all satirists and Graham Norton.
What’s that? “Just hold on one goddam, cotton pickin’ moment, Uncle Vicious,” I hear you say.
“These are all the Republican Presidents, where are all the funny Democrat ones?”
A good point well made but, you see, there weren’t any, only the right wing ones were funny and stupid and racist, don’t you get it yet? Let me explain, I will type slowly.
JFK was a fornicator, he received fan mail from Errol Flynn and even Sinatra, in fact especially Sinatra, they even swapped women, like two kids with World Cup Panini cards.
He screwed in the morning, he screwed in the evening, he screwed at supper time. He wore a surgical belt for his bad back and I, for one, am not surprised one iota.
Just 10 minutes of that kind of nonsense has me reaching for the Radox and some Deep Heat, I salute his indefatigability whilst I also wonder what effect he had on the stock market value of Trojan condoms at the height of his powers.
He is still not much satirized, even nearly 55 years after his demise, his perpetual motion in the bedroom area is acknowledged, of course, it would be hard to miss, even from a sound proof booth on a desert island.
His election, at the whim of his mobster father, is mentioned in passing, it would be hard to miss etc, see above.
Perhaps JFK was not just serious about screwing, whilst that was his signature dish, he may also have had some foolish notions about cleaning out the Augean stables.
Some people somewhere decided this would not do and arranged for some other people to take care of business, now I don’t pretend to know exactly who those people all were.
However, as sure as eggs are little oval shaped things in cartons that one buys in the supermarket, it was categorically not Lee Harvey Patsy Oswald, to give him his full name.
LHPO would probably fail to hit the mythical cow’s arse with a banjo, even with the benefit of a run up.
His expiry at the hands of Jack ‘The Cleaner’ Ruby was probably the first time I became aware that there were sinister forces at work in my squeaky clean little teenage life, a tiny piece of my life had gone bye byes on that day.
JFK was not funny and LBJ, after that, was the man they needed, they needed him to do nothing and that is exactly what he did. LBJ was also not funny.
Pres’n Jimi Cartah was funny though, wasn’t he? He certainly should have been, a peanut farmer from Jawjah, come on, that’s funny right there. I don’t have to say anything do I, just do the voice, ahm Pres’n Jimi Cartah, ahm from Jawjah.
Whilst being stereotypically Southern and satisfyingly vacuous, for some reason, Jimmy Carter was not funny. I can’t think why but he got a safe pass.
It would get better with Bill, without question Teflon Bill would give us a field day, Slick Willy was in town, this was going to be fun surely?
Ah, the rapes, the sexual groping of interns, the perversion of the once hallowed office of the President, fellatio on the floor of the Oval Office, a clever, skillfully improvised cigar tube dildo, the stained blue dress, Bill had everything. Indeed our Bill was the Oasis to JFK’s original Beatles, the finest, fornicating Presidential tribute act of our time.
We all believed, beyond doubt, he would be impeached for his flagrant cocksmithery but yet with one bound, he was free. Like the great heroes of Boy’s Own comics he escaped to live another day and, oh boy, did he live.
Things to do, women to rape, women to grope, Duracell Bill Clinton was just warming up. Hey, he was charismatic though, charismatic but apparently not that funny.
Barack Hussein Obama was the 44th President and the final Democrat who passed up the opportunity to be satirised, from his name to his contentious place of origin, from his lack of ability to his failure to support the black community he claimed to represent, from his remarkable absence of any positive action over a period of eight years to the potential cloud that now hangs over his tenure, from his cack handed attempts at legislation to his foreign policy disasters Obama is possibly the most vapid President I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Where there some opportunities to make fun of him? Are you kidding, every day was an opportunity for that. The satirists missed approximately 2920 days to rip the piss out of this man, inversely they managed, on a regular basis, to attack those who doubted him.
Even our very own Russell Howard, the boss eyed Bristolian, was moved on occasion to send up a black pastor who referred to the sainted Obama as a long legged mack daddy, in plain speak, a pimp master.
Actually that description seems fair to me Russ, maybe stick to your anecdotes about what your brother did when he was like four years old, they’re bloody hilarious mate.
Obama also got a pass, he was a Democrat, bits of him were black and, like Slick Willy, apparently he had charisma too. That will do, in this brave new world that has such people in it, that will do.
You can confuse charisma for ability and that will do, just don’t make fun of it.
So you see, my fellow hams and hocks and all you little gammonettes out there, the bad righties are funny but sad and evil and the lovely lefties are beyond reproach no matter what egregious behaviour they indulge in, they must not be made fun of, unless you know otherwise of course.
In closing, before somebody pipes up that Maxie didn’t actually coin the phrase, the Leader of the Free World, it was actually Frank Capra or someone he was talking to in a bar or some such, I simply don’t care, Maxie was just a vehicle, used for comedic purpose and even if that failed I still don’t care.
In truth I’ve recently grown rather fond of Maxie and I’m actually also seeing quite a bit of Candy lately. It’s not everyday you meet a wealthy widow with an estate in Vermont, Maxie actually left her quite a decent inheritance and even at her age she’s quite a handsome woman. She used to be a cocktail waitress and they can usually spot a good thing, I like to think I can too. Thanks Maxie.
© Viciousbutfair 2018
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