Baller-in-Chief

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/13/AR2008111303349.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Barack Obama’s election victory may have been good for the country, but it’s been awful for comedians. Just ask poor Don Rickles.

He was absolutely killing the audience on David Letterman’s show the other night with his trademark scorched-earth put-downs. Rickles seemed at the top of his game — until he tried to tell a joke about the new president-elect. Not even a well-timed rimshot from the band could have saved him.

It was just a quick bit in which he imagined Obama, faced with his first international crisis, telling his advisers he couldn’t be interrupted because he was busy playing basketball. The joke bombed.

Rickles’s attempts to save the gag only made things worse, and he quickly moved on after pointing out that it was just a basketball joke “that I should have never done.”

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