‘Send in the New Clowns’ : Comics Will Miss Bush, Quayle but Are Already Skewering Clinton, Gore

Nov. 3 was a sad day for Republicans. But it was a day of mourning for joke-slingers across the land.

“When Dan Quayle leaves office, every comedy writer in the country will put on a black armband,” said Rob Burnett, head writer for “Late Night With David Letterman.” “He was sort of like Halley’s comet. Something that good only comes around once every 75 years.”

But just because the nation’s comedians don’t have George Bush and Dan Quayle to kick around anymore doesn’t mean the country is about to stop laughing at its top elected brass.

Witness:

* On the two most pressing decisions President-elect Bill Clinton faces, Letterman quipped: “No. 1, of course, is what can he do with the economy? And second, who the hell is he going to take to the Inaugural Ball?”

* “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno recently made fun of Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, when they got lost after going for a walk in the woods near their home. The horrible part of this story, Leno said, was that they were confronted by a huge bear. Thinking quickly, “Gore broke into a speech and the bear immediately fell asleep.”

* Political satirist and stand-up comedian Paul Krassner kidded that Gore has decided to manufacturer a line of hats with a big “O” for ozone on them. And then, because he is concerned about unemployment among young kids in the inner city, he will encourage them to spend some of their free time playing tick-tack-toe with all the (Malcolm) “X” hats.

“Bush and (Ross) Perot were great characters to play with, but I do recall people asking me four years ago, ‘Aren’t you going to miss Ronald Reagan? Bush isn’t funny at all,’ ” said Harry Shearer, whose radio program of political satire and impersonations, “Le Show,” airs weekends on KCRW-FM (89.9) and about 60 other stations around the country.

“Well, Bush was hilarious and Clinton already offers more prospects than Bush did,” Shearer said. “He is an easily recognizable character: a sax-playing Southerner with a wandering eye. And there’s all the power-starved Democratic lawyers and lobbyists waiting to finally pounce on positions of power. There’s Jesse Jackson. They did an incredible job hiding him during the campaign but he won’t stay out of sight forever. There’s the controversy brewing over what Hillary Clinton is going to do. There are a lot of funny people around Clinton. I say, send in the new clowns.”

Clinton will continue to be skewered by comics for his past reputation as a philanderer and the Gennifer Flowers scandal, several comedy writers said, at least until other events or personalities emerge as one-line fodder. Letterman has said that until Clinton “does something else stupid,” the womanizing jokes would serve as a “stop-gap measure.”

Al Franken, who has been writing political sketches at “Saturday Night Live” since 1975 and has impersonated such politicians as Paul Tsongas and Pat Robertson, said that comedy writers are waiting patiently for a “new buffoon” to step forward. Though “Saturday Night Live,” with Phil Hartman as Clinton, has already toyed with Clinton complaining about his “lousy marriage” and changing his mind all the time to capitalize on his nickname “Slick Willie,” the NBC series has yet “to really figure him out.”

Franken equated the situation to 1976 when Jimmy Carter won the presidency and appeared “perfect,” at least in his command of details of policy issues and legislation. At first, the show preyed upon the idea that Carter knew everything, and at one point, with Dan Aykroyd playing Carter, portrayed him hosting a radio talk show from the Oval Office, talking down a caller who had just dropped acid. Eventually, Franken said, the sheen wore off, Billy Carter stepped forward and Carter’s Administration degenerated into a mess ripe for satire.

No one interviewed for this story said that Clinton’s ascendance from candidate to Leader of the Free World will make him any less a target of barbs and ridicule. Shearer and Krassner, both of whom savaged the Reagan and Bush administrations for years, agreed that the satirist’s most stinging blows should be aimed at the people with the most power.

“It’s cheap to use it on people who have no power but just sound or act different than most,” Shearer said. “You can’t lay off the guy just because he’s President.”

“It’s not a question of reverence for the presidency or our attempt to be irreverent,” the Letterman show’s Burnett said. “The thing that people misunderstand about us is that what we do is entirely reactive, and the fact that he is President will help us react because the things he does will be even more well known. We don’t create the news. If right now I knew that Bill Clinton was a cross-dresser, I couldn’t make jokes about it until that was out in the press and common knowledge. And if he is a cross-dresser, please let me know, because that would be good for tomorrow.”

Arsenio Hall and Jay Leno declined to be interviewed for this story, but through his spokesman, Leno echoed Burnett’s contention that comedians simply react to the news.

“Jay doesn’t consider himself a political comedian, just a comedian,” said Leno’s spokesman. “If something is in the paper that day, Jay will make a joke about it.”

By that measurement, Quayle and Bush will mostly disappear from the joke circuit after January, although at a luncheon given by the Hollywood Radio & Television Society, Garry Shandling, star of HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show,” a spoof of the entire late-night talk-show genre, said: “I personally am going to continue with Dan Quayle jokes. I don’t care what he’s doing.”

And as if to prove that great targets never die, Letterman recently did a Top 10 “Thoughts on Reagan’s Mind at This Moment” that included “No. 3, I wonder whatever happened to that nice Bush fella who used to work for me back East” and “No. 2, Yeah, Yeah, I heard you. You old bag.”

But the left-leaning satirists rejoiced that Quayle will soon fade from the scene because “the jokes about his dumbness actually served to hide the real danger” of his work to weaken environmental regulations and to encourage his conservative opinions on social and lifestyle choices, Krassner said.

“It’s difficult losing Bush, especially because we really had him figured out,” Franken said. “So as a writer I will miss him, yeah, but that’s more than made up for by being an American.”

Other subjects from the presidential campaign will help fill any potential void. Shearer said that the emergence of the daytime talk shows as forums for political salesmanship has led to a situation where “you don’t know, when you turn on ‘Geraldo,’ if you will see women who love men who used to be women, or presidential candidates.”

And then there’s Ross Perot. Shearer envisions doing a sketch with Perot on an infomercial selling the Ginsu knife. Krassner postulates that Perot is bound to call Clinton to browbeat him about his handling of the economy and Clinton will pretend that his call waiting is clicking with another call. Franken foresees “Saturday Night Live” using Perot in absurd situations, such as putting him in a Western sketch as the town’s know-it-all sheriff.

The only person definitely off limits, according to all the comedians, is the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea.

“Chelsea is tough: She is only 12, and we don’t want to go out of our way to make fun of her,” Burnett said. “Although if we are short of other ideas, we probably will.”