One of the more annoying reactions to my piece on President Obama's appearance on Between Two Ferns was the argument that, "Hey, this was just like all the other episodes! Galifianakis' weight is constantly a topic of jokes and the guests give as good as they get! Why would you say that Obama got special treatment?"
My point wasn't so much that the guests never get a wisecrack in or that the G Force star and overweight host isn't sometimes the butt of a joke or two. Rather, it was that the focus of the show is awkward anti-comedy: Zach G. asks ridiculous questions or makes ridiculous statements that highlight the absurdity of the celebrity interview format until the bit is over. I was so annoyed by the idea that the Obama interview was as funny as—or even particularly similar to—previous segments that I went back and watched them all. And with two exceptions (the episodes with Tina Fey and Steve Carell, more on them in a moment), the notion that the guest gives as good as he gets is, simply, deeply and willfully inaccurate.
Not including the Fey and Carell segments, there are either five or six* episodes with fat jokes at Galifianakis' expense. In four (or five) of those episodes, the fat jokes come after a series of excruciatingly awkward questions in which the guest sits there and squirms as Zach G. does his shtick.** Unlike Obama, they don't just immediately launch into broadsides against the host; they take a certain amount of abuse before returning fire and insulting his body and his work.
As I said, Fey and Carell are exceptions to this rule. But in both of their segments they are doing a very specific thing: They're deconstructing his deconstruction of the celebrity interview. They are reacting to his bit as a concept rather than reacting "off the cuff" to his insults. When Obama starts slinging insults it simply looks as if he can't take a joke, as if he's too good to do a bit where he's made to look foolish. I'd be curious to know how much input he and his people had on the script***—or if Galifianakis, a Democratic booster and American Bridge donor who has served as a prop for Michelle Obama in the past, would even contemplate the possibility of making the president sit there awkwardly as he cracked wise about the administration's myriad failures.
Again, the real problem with this bit is that it just doesn't land. Monkeying with the format is the least of its problems: Obama doesn't have terribly good comedic timing and looks stiff. He's much better at slow-jamming the news than he is at trying to give Galifianakis grief. More his milieu, you know?
Just don't try and convince fans of the show like myself that this was in line with the rest of the series' output.
*I think Aniston makes a fat joke at the end of her piece, but I was having trouble making it out. If she does, that's six. The other episodes: Charlize Theron, Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, and Jennifer Lawrence's bit in the Oscar montage.
**The best of these is almost certainly the first instance, with Charlize Theron, in which she almost falls out of her chair laughing at the very idea that she would go skinny dipping with "a fat garden gnome." It works the best for me because it comes almost organically in the course of the interview; contrast that to the episode with Will Ferrell, which simply has a child come out about two minutes in to announce to Galifianakis, "You're fat." Meh.
***Further backing up my point yesterday that the bootlickers over at Funny or Die are more interested in helping out the president than bringing the funny, check out this disgustingly obsequious quote from Between Two Ferns executive producer Scott Aukerman:
Did [Obama] pitch jokes?
I don’t think the president has to pitch jokes, he just says jokes and we enjoy them.
Emphasis mine, because gross.