Not funny yet

Are we going to be in for a humorless four years? From the Los Angeles Times, on the Obama camp's reaction to that New Yorker cover:

The real mudslinging of this year's presidential campaign won't even start until after the party conventions in August, but it's already beginning to seem as though the Obama camp is a trifle thin-skinned. If it reacts this way to a cartoon drawn by a sympathizer who was mocking the outrageous slurs that have been directed at the candidate, what are they going to do when the Republicans start sharpening their artists' pencils?

And The New York Times, on late-night comedians' inability to find anything funny about Obama:

Jokes have been made about what Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton really thought about Mr. Obama during the primaries, and about the vulgar comments the Rev. Jesse Jackson made about him last week. But anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat.

When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you're allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”

The New York Times piece may overstate the case. There have been a lot of Obama jokes, and About.com even has a list of them. Conan O'Brien: "The founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream are endorsing Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton, which makes sense because Baracky Road is a catchier name for an ice cream than Pantsuits and Cream."