Word: showness
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...racial angle has also provided good fodder for African-American comics like Kyle Grooms (who does one of the better Obama impressions) and Larry Wilmore, the Daily Show's "senior black correspondent," who also talks about Obama in his stand-up act. Yet Wilmore's jabs are directed, as usual, mostly at the country's reaction to Obama ("that is a very comfortable level of black") rather than the President himself; the worst he can do is lampoon Obama's habit of giving long-winded answers to even simple questions...
Letterman, typically, managed to turn the comedian's predicament itself into the joke. For months after Obama's Inauguration, the Late Show host trotted out a nerdy staff writer to read his latest attempts at coming up with Obama jokes - all of which turned out to be lamely repurposed Bush jokes. ("Barack Obama is so dumb, when he was governor of Texas, someone asked him what the capital of Texas is, and he said, 'Capital T.' ") Still, the edge that crept into Letterman's comedy during the Bush years has, if anything, only gotten sharper. (Yes, he was forced...
...Stewart's Daily Show too has seemed even more energized in the Obama era. Stewart's great discovery, of course, was that political satire in the 2000s no longer requires actual jokes. All that's needed is merely to present the hypocrisy and pomposity of political leaders in their raw, unvarnished form (Republicans denouncing Sonia Sotomayor on the floor of the U.S. Senate, say, before her inevitable confirmation) and append it with a sarcastic exclamation point or simply a mugging reaction shot. And if conservative politicians and talk-show hosts still bear the brunt of most of Stewart's barbs...
...paid back the billions of dollars, and then some, of taxpayer money the government forced it to take last October; raised billions of dollars in capital from private investors, including $5 billion from Warren Buffett; and urged its cadre of well-paid and high-performing executives to show some restraint on the conspicuous-consumption front...
...anyone shoulders the "blame" for Goldman's golden performance, it is Blankfein. Self-deprecating and seemingly unassuming, the former gold salesman has been ruthlessly ambitious for his firm and its continued success. "He takes it very personally when people act against the firm or show disloyalty," says a former Goldman executive. (See the worst business deals...