Quite a claim from Richard Zoglin in the Washington Post:
A sense of unease is starting to build. . . . The first crisis of the Biden Administration could be looming. America may have a president, the first in generations, who is impervious to impressionists . . . Biden, so far, has been impregnable. The voice is too bland and devoid of obvious quirks, and beyond the occasional ‘C’mon, man,’ his conversational manner too muted and self-effacing to give the parodists much to work with. . . . Biden’s pleasantly boring presidency has been a welcome return to normalcy – but hardly great material for parody.
This column ran the very same day Biden forgot the name of his own secretary of defense and couldn’t even remember what to call the Defense Department itself, calling it “that outfit over there.” Biden has for many years exhibited a tendency for lying, bullying, weirdly aggressive yet pathetic deluded-old-man boasting, sniffing women’s hair and cuddling them to the point where they start blinking out S.O.S. signals, and making all sorts of cringe-inducing comments about race. Oh, and if you were in the joke-manufacturing industry, you might also find giggles in the fact that Biden has tightened his skin so many times that his face looks like Jason Voorhees’s hockey mask, his hair plugs are 100 percent rayon, and watching him try to get through a sentence is like observing a blind drunk trying to navigate his way through a mine field. Also he is 135 years old. If his minders let him talk to reporters for any length of time, he’d surely tell them all about how he used to wear onions on his belt (which was the style at the time).
It’s one heckuva coincidence that the last time a Democrat was president, a leading comedy expert claimed it was impossible to make fun of him, too. Jim Downey, the longtime SNL writer who specialized in political sketches, changed his tune slightly when speaking of Barack Obama, who was such a monument to perfection that Downey spoke of him in hushed tones of trembling reverence: “If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10. It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature.” Actually, there was quite a lot to grab onto!
