Take the Presidency . . . Please

Ray Siller, Johnny Carson’s head writer on “The Tonight Show,” is grateful that Michael Dukakis is short. Now he has something to use on the candidate: platform shoe jokes.

One of Bob Hope’s writers prefers George Bush’s malapropisms to Dukakis’s height. “I read a column yesterday of quotes Bush has made throughout the campaign. It was funny as hell. He just shoots off without thinking,” says Bob Mills.

The Lampooning of the Candidates, 1988, is under way. And it’s no pastime, it’s a business, as comedians and joke writers begin to shift their sights from the familiar target of Ronald Reagan and take aim at two drier personalities, candidates Bush and Dukakis.

“Well, here we are in another presidential race, bringing us down to a . . . choice between George Bush and Michael Dukakis. And there isn’t enough caffeine in the world to keep us awake for that one,” political satirist Mark Russell says in his act.

Russell, who has 30 years’ experience joking about Presidents, says it doesn’t matter whether Bush or Dukakis wins; the jokes will flow. “(The Presidents) are all funny. I can say none of them has let me down.”

Maybe so, but impressionist Rich Little isn’t enthusiastic about the candidates, at least in terms of comedy material. “Dull and duller” is how he describes them. Little ranks Reagan a 10 for comedy fodder; Jimmy Carter was an 8, Gerald Ford a 5, Richard Nixon a 10.

Dukakis and Bush?

“About a 2,” Little says. Little, who does about 50 voices in his act, nonetheless plans to work up Dukakis and Bush impressions.

Gene Perret, another of Bob Hope’s troop of six writers, concedes that Bush and Dukakis “haven’t evolved as characters yet.” But after writing jokes for Hope on the last five presidential races, he’s not worried.

“When Carter emerged, no one knew who he was unless you were from Georgia. Then you found out about the skeletons in his closet.”

“The Carters were such a diverse group: Miss Lillian, Billy, Amy talking about nuclear proliferation,” Mills recalls.

Mills is a member of Bob Hope’s beeper brigade. He doesn’t leave home without a beeper on his belt because he’s on call 24 hours in case Hope needs an emergency joke transfusion. Coming up with Bush and Dukakis material at this point is tougher than making Reagan jokes, he says, because there aren’t as many reference points.

“Everything you think of, you have to double-check and say, ‘Does the public know about this?’ The thing about humor, especially one-liners, is they have to make the association like that ,” Mills says, snapping his fingers.

Rich Little figures he’ll get his best Bush and Dukakis material from the fall debates. He shaped his Reagan impression, he says, from the 1980 Carter-Reagan debate.

“Reagan’s got all that body language and all that hesitation, the ‘Well,’ and ‘There he goes again,’ and that shifting and looking down and that little smirk.”

It’s axiomatic, Mills says, that as the campaign develops, so will Bush’s and Dukakis’ idiosyncrasies and then the jokes will fall into place.

“I wish we had a nickel for every jelly bean joke we’ve done in the last eight years. You grab onto something like that and you hit it every which way,” Mills says.

For now, though, much of the material on Bush and Dukakis is necessarily superficial.

“You can’t be ahead of the audience,” says Siller.

How to lampoon a relatively unknown figure such as Dukakis?

“Sometimes you start with physical characteristics, like an editorial cartoonist does,” Siller says. He ticks off the obvious Dukakis hooks: Greek background, bushy eyebrows, height.

Last winter, one of Siller’s first Dukakis jokes was an elaborate dud. Johnny Carson’s line was: “Gov. Michael Dukakis claims he’d run the country like he ran Massachusetts. He’ll eliminate the Army, Navy, Air Force and defend the country by having Boston Marathon runners wear sharpened Nikes.”

More recently, Carson’s Dukakis jokes have aimed low and hit the funny bone.

“Dukakis . . . is pretty confident now. I understand he’s already bought Phone Book 1 to sit on in the Oval Office. . . .

“Dukakis . . . took a break campaigning today. He was in a seafood restaurant in Boston and he asked the waiter, ‘Do you serve shrimps here?’ And the waiter said, ‘Sit down, we serve anybody.’ ”

Mark Russell, who often displays his wit and his satirical songs on public television, isn’t a fan of superficial humor. “I’m a political satirist. My audience expects a little more than the Greek and the short and the eyebrows.”

So what Dukakis hooks is he using?

“There aren’t any now,” he says with a laugh. “There’s the Greek and the short and the eyebrows.” Still, he admires the line from William Safire’s column about Dukakis: “Beware of Greek’s wearing lifts.”

Russell is going after Dukakis’ colorless image. In his act, Russell says: “Zorba the Clerk. He’s called a technocrat. We may go from the Gipper to Mr. Goodwrench overnight. Well, there’s a difference. Mr. Goodwrench raises your hood and says, ‘I don’t like the sound of that engine.’ The Gipper slams the hood shut and says, ‘See. Now you don’t hear it anymore.’ ”

Matt Neuman, head writer for HBO’s irreverent “Not Necessarily the News,” was thinking out loud about Dukakis and mentioned Mrs. Dukakis’ past amphetamine addiction. But he quickly dismissed it because drug use jokes are now considered in bad taste--at least on television.

Not so at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, where George Miller, a tart-tongued comedian, launched this one: “I read in Time magazine where Mike Dukakis said his wife had an amphetamine problem for years. They got married and he discovered the problem 11 years into the marriage. That’s what we want in the White House. A speed freak and somebody who’s observant.”

At the moment, Bush offers more diverse comedy targets, such as his struggle to escape Reagan’s shadow. When President Reagan made a seemingly lukewarm official endorsement of Bush, Johnny Carson was ready the next day: “Reagan said, ‘Well, we haven’t had a President named George for a long time; maybe it’s worth a try.’ ”

There are, of course, wimp jokes. Mills came up with this one for Bob Hope: “Last week George Bush went to his manicurist and had them insert dirt under his fingernails.”

But Russell says, “Wimp is over.” He’s sticking with political intrigue: “I don’t know if Bush was involved in Iran-Contra. I really don’t know. For seven years, you know, we’d say to George Bush, ‘You’re only the vice president, they keep you out of things.’ He’d say, ‘Oh no, I’m involved.’ Now we’re saying, ‘Aha, you were involved!’ He’s saying, ‘Oh no, I was only the vice president.’ ”

Of all the presidential candidates this year, the most delicate jokes were lobbed toward Jesse Jackson.

“The problem with Jackson is . . . whatever you said . . . there would be an extra second while the audience subconsciously determined whether you’d said anything racist or not,” says Russell.

Pat Paulsen, the sad-eyed humorist, says that several lines he wrote about Jackson for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” on CBS were cut out because they were considered “too harsh.”

Despite the nerve that political humor often touches, it remains something of a cottage industry. There are far more editorial cartoonists (about 300) than entertainers who use political humor as a staple in their acts. The short list includes Carson, Hope, Russell and Mort Sahl, and there are some routines on “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Why so few?

“It’s so damn expensive,” says Mills.

Political humor, like bread, has a short shelf life and is best when it’s made fresh every day. David Letterman has a dozen writers. Carson has 10 writers, and five of them work solely on Carson’s monologue, scanning the news to come up with 60 jokes a day that he prunes down to 15 to 20 per night.