Ronald Wilson Reagan: Humor in the Highest Office
Our new exhibition “One Life: Ronald Reagan” is open through May 28, 2012.
In Changing Places, David Lodge’s 1975 satire of American and British academic life in the late 1960s, Lodge discusses the disparity between the youth culture and the establishment at a fictitious California university:
By the year of 1969, Euphoric State had perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was already in the process of decline—due partly to the accelerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and partly to the counter-pressure exerted by the right-wing Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie-actor.
Beginning with his tenure as governor of California (1967–75), Ronald Reagan was hit with a barrage of jokes, most of them weak attempts at discrediting the man whose career had taken him from Hollywood to Sacramento, from the sound stage to the podium. Even as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan would bear the brunt of such humor.
One of the ghosts of Reagan’s acting career—the chimpanzee Bonzo from the 1951 film Bedtime for Bonzo—was a constant theme attached to Reagan’s political career, for better or for worse. In a December 1980 post-election article from People magazine, David Sheff wrote:
The name Bonzo stayed alive in part because Bedtime’s director, Fred De Cordova, went on to produce The Tonight Show—and became the brunt of innumerable Bonzo jokes from Johnny Carson. Bedtime was also a popular ad hominem weapon among Reagan’s critics during his years in the California statehouse and became a favorite at campus "Dump Ron" rallies. For that reason, Brickman charges, Republicans among the Universal Pictures brass tried to tie up all the Bedtime prints when Reagan began his presidential bid.
Reagan, however, could take the jokes and dish them out as well. Actor and director Clint Eastwood shared with Reagan a simian cinematic experience when he starred in the 1978 film Every Which Way But Loose and its 1980 sequel, Any Which Way You Can, in which Eastwood played a rambling, fighting mechanic, Philo Beddoe, whose companion is a chimpanzee, Clyde. When Eastwood ran for mayor of Carmel, California, in 1986, President Reagan asked, “What makes him think a middle-aged actor who’s played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?’”
One of the president’s comments did not tickle the collective funny bone. On August 11, 1984, before his weekly radio talk, President Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” The comment was widely received as irreverent and hostile.
At most other times, Ronald Reagan’s sense of humor and theatricality served him well. In his 1988 State of the Union address, the president emphasized the need for a more understandable and accessible budget. During the speech, Reagan noted, “Last year, of the thirteen appropriations bills due by October 1st, none of them made it. Instead, we had four continuing resolutions lasting forty-one days, then thirty-six days, and two days, and three days, respectively. And then, along came these behemoths.” As he spoke, he began pulling tomes of fiscal legislation from a large pile beside the podium. The president continued:
This is the conference report—1,053 page report weighing fourteen pounds. Then this—a reconciliation bill six months lat, that was 1,186 pages long, weighing fifteen pounds; and the long-term continuing resolution—this one was two months late and it’s 1,057 pages long, weighing fourteen pounds. That was a total of forty-three pounds of paper and ink. You had three hours—yes, three hours—to consider each, and it took three hundred people at my Office of Management and Budget just to read the bill so the government wouldn’t shut down. Congress shouldn’t send another one of these. No, and if you do, I will not sign it.
The effect was both startling and funny, as Reagan set the volumes aside, shaking his right wrist as though the weight of the resolutions was slightly painful to handle. And while the aisle in the chamber clearly marked the political division on the budgetary process, the president had made his point with a humorous efficacy.
Throughout his political career, Ronald Reagan used humor to take the sharp edge off serious messages, and he also used it to alleviate the hurt of detractors. Reagan’s age was the subject of many jokes during his presidency, and in a famous moment during the October 28, 1984, presidential debate with former Vice President Walter Mondale, President Reagan spun the issue in his own favor, deadpanning, “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” In another instance, he noted, “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.”
—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits
Cited:
Lodge, David. Changing Places. New York: Penguin Group, 1975.
Sheff, David. “Two Ex-Screenwriters Turn the 1980 Election into Boomtime for Bonzo and Their Own Bonanza,” People, December 15, 1980.
