What the hell, it's just gotta be funny

Word is that people are wringing their hands over the propriety of making Obama jokes now that he's going to be president:

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the past few days about whether comedy will suffer under an Obama presidency because comics (especially the all-white corps of late-night hosts) will feel squeamish making jokes about the new president. Such talk assumes that the president-elect lacks the capacity to make or enjoy jokes at his own expense (clearly not true, given his recent remark that his daughters' new puppy should be "a mutt, like me"), and that his presidency will usher in an era of no-fun-allowed political correctness in which dissenting voices will be silenced. Fears of comedic censorship (or self-censorship) are overblown and unrealistic, but it will be tricky to make Obama jokes, though maybe not for the reasons the hand-wringers expect.
Granted, we've not heard a lot of Obama jokes so far; the ones floating around since the election have mostly been about assassination fears. (Of course, that's more a joke about pervasive American racial paranoia than about Obama specifically; in fact, Eddie Murphy was making similar jokes about Jesse Jackson 25 years ago.) The reason, however, isn't political correctness, but rather the difficulty of finding something in Obama himself to make fun of. He hasn't done anything yet, so he can't be lampooned for his gaffes in office, and he hasn't revealed the personal idiosyncracies that would be easy for comics to caricature. If there's one positive effect that an Obama presidency will have on comedy, it's that it'll force comics to be more creative and clever in order to find something spoof-worthy about Obama; they won't be able to rely, as they have for the past 30 years, on cheap and easy jokes about, say, Reagan's dottiness or Clinton's libido, or W.'s dimwittedness.
If Denis Leary can make jokes about autism, or Sarah Silverman can make jokes about any taboo subject she can think of, do you really think they're going to avoid taking on the new president? Comedy is usually about attacking the powerful rather than the underdog (which is what Obama was until the last few weeks of the campaign), but as D.L. Hughley points out to the Associated Press, Obama is now the most powerful man on the planet; which comic could resist that target? Besides, as Tracy Morgan tells The New York Times, white comics who avoid riffing on the president risk seeming irrelevant.
Besides, if all else fails, as Jay Leno notes, there's always Joe Biden.

Rico says he'll work on his Obama jokes, but Biden will be an easier target...