"The Joke That Gave Us A President"

Good day to you.

I rise today to apologize for my tribe, by which, I do not, on this occasion – or on any occasion – mean the Jews.

I mean comedy writers.

As many of you know, I am – or at least was – a professional comedy-writing participant.  As a member of that mirth-making fraternity, more than a year after the fact, I believe it is past time for one of us to step up and forthrightly say,

“I’m sorry, Humanity.  We messed up real bad.”

Comedy people are uniquely aware that being funny carries an onerous responsibility.  Like a powerful football player, drilling himself to gingerly shake hands so as not to inadvertently crush his vulnerable, fellow-handshaker’s fingers, a writer of comedy must be assiduously vigilant, wielding their equally dangerous

“Weapon of Wit.”

Which brings me, sadly, to the anonymous “Funny Person” who wrote the sequence of jokes I am about to reveal to you today, and the blistering consequences those sharp but “in bounds” sequence of jokes unleashed on this country and, ultimately,

The World.

I am referring, of course, to the 2016 National Press Club dinner, during which

then President Obama “Took the ‘Mickey’”, as the English say, out of Donald Trump, then just a self-promoting real-estate blowhard.

Those were the days, weren’t they?

Anyway – not to editorialize – the National Press Club dinner has a longstanding tradition of allowing sitting presidents, having withstood a flurry of “funnies” at their expense, to then take to the microphone and fire back some bantering potshots of his own.

Which, that night, then President Obama consummately accomplished.

Little did he know – though he arguably should have – that the notoriously thin-skinned Donald Trump would angrily internalize this humorous targeting and, under the searing heat of public humiliation,

calculate his revenge. 

The rest, of course, is history.  Resulting, it must be honestly acknowledged, from the complicit collusion of a contributing comedy writer.

I know he – or she, but probably he – feels terrible about this.  And, admitting that it is nowhere close to being enough, I deeply apologize on his – or her, but probably his – agonizing behalf.

What punishing, sleep-deprived nights that guilt-ridden writer of comedy must be enduring, knowing - and forever regretting –

they wrote this.