Shot:
(Interestingly, Sonny Bunch, posting in the conservative Washington Free Beacon, criticized Obama for not understanding "the point of [Between Two Ferns] -- the guest is not supposed to get in good zingers; he’s supposed to be taken down a peg." In fact, Galifianakis, playing an idiot, is usually the one who looks bad.) [Emphasis mine]
Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times TV critic
What I was most trying to do was make a funny video with a famous person. That’s what Between Two Ferns is, is we get famous people on the show, we try to bring them down a notch, and, meanwhile, the reason they are on the show is because they’re plugging something. [Emphasis mine]
Between Two Ferns executive producer Scott Aukerman,* talking to Jian Ghomeshi.
Just saying, is all.
*Earlier in the interview, Aukerman laughed off my suggestion that he was betraying the spirit of comedy practiced by Harold Ramis. Ramis was opposed to powerful conservative politicians like Nixon and Reagan, he said, not the powerful more broadly.
I'm going to skip through this little minefield—the EPA bureaucrat oppressing the Ghostbusters wasn't exactly Reagan incarnate and the snobs v. slobs attitude of Animal House and Caddyshack has always struck me as more or less apolitical—and instead suggest that Ramis, even if he agreed with the president in office, never would have said something as disgustingly obsequious as "I don’t think the president has to pitch jokes, he just says jokes and we enjoy them." That's gross. And not exactly an example of "trying to bring them down a notch."