SubscribeSo how might Bush entertain the crowd this time? How about knock -knock jokes featuring Terri Schiavo? Or gags about North Korea's expanding nuclear weapons arsenal? He could kid about holding hands with Saudi Prince Abdullah while gas prices are skyrocketing. Or jokingly ask old people to die sooner to help him deal with Social Security. How about an impression of Tom DeLay grabbing loose change from the collection plate at church? Bush really has lots of material to choose from.
When Laura Bush wise-cracked at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner on Saturday night that she was a "desperate housewife" married to a man who was sound asleep by 9 p.m., a slight, worried man stood in the wings hanging on to every line. As well he might, since he had written most of them for the first lady's inaugural act as a stand-up comic.
Judging from the laughter at her words - "George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw, which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well" - Landon Parvin, joke writer to the political stars, could relax. ....
Parvin, who normally writes jokes for the president, also wrote jokes and presidential speeches for Ronald Reagan and is remembered in Washington for the lyrics to "Secondhand Clothes," the song that Nancy Reagan performed at the 1982 correspondents' dinner lampooning her taste in designers.
Parvin, 56, writes for Republicans but also for Democrats whom he likes, such as Bill Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan and Robert Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He is the son of a University of Illinois accountant and says that he was a well-liked but unfunny misfit growing up. In 1981, he was writing for the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm when he got a job as a Reagan speechwriter.
He now writes serious speeches for politicians and executives from his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but is called in every year to do Bush's routines for four Washington events: the Gridiron; the Alfalfa Club; a radio and television correspondents' dinner; and the White House press dinner. Bush, he said, "works on the script, and practices, and takes it seriously." Parvin (and the president) have had one recent bomb, however: Bush's joke at the radio and television dinner last year that "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere" as a slide showed the president rummaging under the Oval Office furniture.
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Thank goodness she's such a good Christian or someone might get the idea she's alluding to equine hand jobs, thong stuffing and a very limp husband. I'm sure James Dobson would interpret these comments correctly as her desire for her husband to take his proper leadership role. And, of course, if she doesn't respond to his leadership George can always take a belt to her as if she's a dauchshund.
Heh.
posted by randomstriker at 12:17 PM on May 1, 2005