Planet Funny

From Chapter 9: A Blurry, Amorphous Thud

The decline of traditional news and balkanization of media led President Barack Obama far afield to reach millennial voters, and comedy outlets—particularly new digital ones—were among the most surprising beneficiaries. Even in 2015, it was still eye-opening to have a sitting president discussing race relations in Marc Maron's garage—the first episode of WTF ever where Maron didn't spell out for listeners what the podcast's title stood for—or pondering his political legacy while tooling around the South Lawn in a 1963 Corvette Stingray for Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The title made it official: The President of the United States wasn't just a guy that comedians sometimes nervously joked with, which was the novelty of the Clinton and Bush years. He was now the Comedian-in-Chief.

The most surprising presidential drop-in took place in March 2014 when, without any fanfare or warning, the comedy website Funny or Die posted a new installment of its periodic web series Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis. Between Two Ferns was a mock public-access show, in which an A-list celebrity of the "good sport" variety (Jennifer Lawrence, Jon Hamm) sat opposite the Hangover star in front of a black backdrop and parried or squirmed through three minutes of inept interview. Galifianakis told Brad Pitt he looked "like Hitler's dream," requested a donation of his sperm, and played him the Friends theme song; Natalie Portman was asked point-blank for her phone number and then about pubic hair grooming. Much of the comedy is created in the editing, as the pair is often allowed to sit in uncomfortable silence while the audience cringes at Galifianakis's latest mumbled question. Barack Obama was the last person anyone expected to see on the show, but there he was, gritting his teeth through stupid questions like "What should we do about North Ikea?" for three minutes before pivoting the conversation toward his new health care bill. "Okay, let's get this out of the way," sighed Galifianakis, obviously annoyed. "What did you come here to plug?"

Galifianakis and Scott Aukerman, the Comedy Bang! Bang! host who co-created Between Two Ferns with him, had been trying unsuccessfully to get Obama on the show for six years. But by the time of the Obamacare rollout, when the administration actually started warming up to the idea, they'd pretty much given up. "We just wanted it to be good," Aukerman told me. "We didn't care whether it happened or not. Also, we did not think it was going to happen." At the time of the video's release, the White House had warned him not to discuss its filming, not even how long it took to shoot. But almost two years had passed and Aukerman didn't mind talking about it. We were at a Thai restaurant in upper Hollywood, and political primary coverage was playing on the TV over the bar. It was a week before Christmas, and Obama was entering his last year in office.

"We were pushing for doing it exactly as we'd always done it," Aukerman said. On a typical Between Two Ferns, the guest is told to show up with no publicist or entourage, and then just sits on a makeshift stage for an hour or two with Galifianakis, their responses fully unscripted. "Charlize Theron just drove up herself, did the show, left. That's really the way to do it." The White House, unsurprisingly, didn't think the president could just drive himself to a basement or shed for a couple hours of improv. Aukerman was reluctant to compromise, and it wasn't just because he was worried about losing the show's improvised feel.

"We thought the minute that they saw the jokes they were going to cancel the whole thing," he said. "So we were doing everything we could to make sure they never saw the jokes." Finally, Funny or Die agreed to show an outline to its White House contact, a speechwriter. "Oh my God, this is so funny!" he said, reading through it. Then he started going through the outline joke by joke, and explaining why they wouldn't be able to use any of their material. Aukerman realized he'd been right, this was never going to happen. He was ready to pull out. In today's world, the White House auditions for comedy writers, not the other way around.

But suddenly the staffer changed his mind. "You know what?" he said. "In my job, I'm always the guy who's being asked to pull back on stuff. You shouldn't have to do that. You guys should be able to do these jokes." The speechwriter didn't like Obama taking a second jab at Galifianakis's weight ("We don't want to make it seem like it's a go-to joke for him") but for the most part, the script ended up in the teleprompter untouched. Galifianakis realized he was actually going to have to ask Obama, "What's it like to be the last black president?"

"With any Hollywood star, half of the jokes would have been killed before we started the interview," marveled Aukerman. "But there was something about the White House where they weren't from Hollywood, and they weren't used to dealing with asshole Hollywood publicists who like to kill everything—maybe they didn't know they could kill jokes. They let us do stuff that I never in a million years thought they would let us do."

On the day of the shoot, the Funny or Die crew set up in the Diplomatic Room, a reception room on the ground floor of the White House. Their green room was the adjacent Map Room, the walls covered with marked-up maps from historic military campaigns. They were told they would only have the president for fifty minutes, so the crew prepped everything they could, then waited. And waited. They grabbed lunch with White House staffers, and even bowled a few frames in the Truman Bowling Alley. The president was running late. Galifianakis kept sitting on antique chairs in the Map Room, and getting scolded by a guard—"but then he would never give us chairs," Aukerman remembered.

Finally Obama appeared, and everyone, staffers and video crew alike, snapped noticeably to attention. He greeted Galifianakis and they started chatting about actor Bradley Cooper, the mutual acquaintance who had helped Funny or Die get their foot in the door with the administration. But by now time was even more limited. "The president is a one-and-done guy," an aide told Aukerman. "He's only going to do one take."

"What if I'd like him to do another?"

"Why would you want him to do another take?" replied the aide, genuinely confused and a little unnerved by the idea of a comedian giving direction to the most powerful man on earth.

"Oh, if I just want a different read or something."

"Why would he need to read something differently?"

Aukerman realized he wasn't speaking the right language. "What if he gets a fact wrong?"

This finally got through. "Oh, something like that, okay. Tell you what: the president looks to me to get him out of situations. If you need to do another take, look to me, give me a sign, and I'll give the nod to president to let him know it's okay. If you really, really feel like you need one."

Two minutes into the first take, the crew was told they only had fifteen minutes left, much less than the hour they were promised. "I could see the video, the chances of it being good, disappearing before our very eyes," Aukerman said. The first take wasn't going well, largely due to Galifianakis's evident nervousness at having to repeatedly insult and annoy the President of the United States just a few hundred feet from the Oval Office. But about halfway through something changed. The interview started clicking. Galifianakis and Obama had loosened up and were trading jokes, improvising around the outline. Aukerman began wondering if there was any way to save the unfunny first half in the editing room, and when the cameras cut, he immediately looked for the aide who was supposed to be his advocate with the president.

But before he could make eye contact, Obama turned to Aukerman. "Well, what do you think?"

Despite strict warnings not to do precisely this, Aukerman screwed up his courage. "Well, Mr. President, to be honest, halfway through it got so good, and really loosened up. I wish we could do the first half with that kind of fun and energy, but I'm told that you have to go."

"Let's do it again," Obama told the room.

"Instinctively, I think he knew when it got good," Aukerman remembered. "He stopped [the second take]. He went, 'That was it, right?' and I said, 'Yeah, actually that was the moment when it got really good.'" The president went around the room thanking everyone—"even the twenty-two-year-old weird bearded cameraman from Funny or Die"—and that was a wrap.

Aukerman and Galifianakis couldn't believe what they'd gotten away with. That night at an after-party, a staffer congratulated them on how well the sketch had gone, but added, "Well, we're going to want to cut it down so the Obamacare stuff is the majority of it." That sent them into another panicky tailspin, but a few weeks later when Aukerman sent his edit to the White House, complete with all the testy sparring and awkward silences and side-eye of a regular episode of Between Two Ferns, it was a big hit. The administration's only request: add one cutaway to Obama smiling, so it's clear he's in on the joke and having fun. Except for that, the only question was, "When do we put it out?"

The video went live on Funny or Die just two weeks later. It was viewed twelve million times on its first day, and became the #1 referrer to the Obamacare website. Health secretary Kathleen Sebelius called it "the Galifianakis bump." But to Aukerman, the real point of pride had nothing to do with the uninsured. It was that the video had turned out funny—and not "funny" like you usually get from Washington, warmed-over Bob Hope stuff, but the real deal. Comedians were calling and texting him non-stop congratulating him on the coup. He couldn't figure out why the White House had trusted them, but he knew the video wouldn't have done a thing for Obamacare otherwise. "I don't know what it was, but it was absolutely the only way to do that kind of thing. Because people can smell when something is inauthentic and when someone is just trying to curry favor with young people."

One of the interminable string of Republican primary debates had begun on the TV in the corner while Aukerman was telling me the story. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz were sniping at the long-shot candidate, Donald Trump, in broken closed-captioning.

"Look," I said. "You're framing this as a subversive thing that you guys got away with, but in five years, if President Rubio wanted to do Between Two Ferns promoting, like, a tax cut for the rich, or tightening immigration, you wouldn't be like, 'Okay, let's do a funny video about deportation,' right? As a comedian, are you worried that the powers that be have figured out that they need to have comedy working for them?"

"We've been asked to do—well, for instance, say Dick Cheney wanted to do Between Two Ferns. Our idea if Dick Cheney were to do it was to just drop all jokes and start grilling him on why he's a war criminal. That would have been funny to us."

"How hypothetical is this Cheney example?"

A long pause. "I don't know. Can't say."

Trump was speaking silently now in close-up, the captioning barely able to keep up with his run-on sentences. "I do think that you could do something with Trump," Aukerman mused. "Trump is a magnetic dude. You could do a viral video with Trump and have it be funny."

I was absolutely convinced that no viral video could get Donald Trump, of all people, elected president, and said so. But Aukerman had had this conversation before. Back in 1999, he said, his Mr. Show castmates Bob Odenkirk and David Cross were both convinced that George W. Bush would never be president, and laughed at Aukerman's theory that nowadays, name recognition and celebrity were enough to put someone in the White House. "But that's what happened. He was famous enough."

"The best advertisement for Trump's campaign is Celebrity Apprentice, where he's never talking about politics. Today any reality star could make a go of it."

Trump and Jeb Bush were in split-screen now, talking over the top of each other. They were the two candidates most likely to get a head-start from name recognition, but on screen their demeanor couldn't have been more different. Bush was staring blankly ahead with his shoulders slumped and his mouth a hard little hyphen, as if he'd rather be anywhere else. Trump, by contrast, was a cartoon character, grinning and mugging and gesturing with his arms so widely that his half of the screen couldn't even hold him. He seemed like a force of pure television energy too big, too intense, to be contained.

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