Over at Slate today, Christopher Hitchens has a good — albeit week-late — hungover ramble about Obama’s narcissistic jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the court jestering of Wanda Sykes. Here he is on the latter:

She used up almost all her time with loud attacks, not all of them thigh-slappingly funny, on the previous administration and on the critics of the incumbent one. I am pretty sure that this is a first. Anyone with a memory even of the Clinton-Bush years will be able to remember that the comic talent, whether funny or not, was always engaged to “roast” the chief executive to some degree. And this in turn prompts my question: Did the inviting committee fail to explain this to Ms. Sykes? How does it come about that the whole point of the annual press beano was negated by a performer who is more than 100 percent in the president’s corner?

That is a little cruel on poor old Wanda, perhaps. She made a fair number of reasonable gags at the President’s expense. (Though it didn’t compare to Stephen Colbert’s famous ribbing of Bush II.) Clearly Hitchens, a great booster of Bush’s wars, didn’t enjoy Sykes’s allusion to the foreign-policy misadventures of Obama’s predecessor.

He has a point, however. There was more than a whiff of sycophancy about the evening, all the stronger for being entirely self-aware. This fits into a broader, and at times worrying, trend in American political comedy in the Age of Obama – exemplified by Jon Stewart. The butt of too many professional jokes about the new administration is meant to be: isn’t it funny how amazing He is? or rather isn’t it funny how much we love him?

As for Obama’s routine, Hitchens is again unkind — yet partially accurate:

Barack Obama may be graceful and charming on the podium, but he is not a natural wit. And on May 9 Obama made the same point in a different way: by pausing for a smile-break to mark his every punchline. It may be a fetching-enough smile, but we old stand-up artists learned long ago that if you have to signal a joke, then it is a weak one. Any audience that is being cued or prompted to applaud is also likely to say to itself, “Actually, we’ll be the judge of that.” …..

….

President Bush used to tell jokes about his weaknesses, the most salient of these being his tragic struggle with grammar, itself quite possibly rooted in dyslexia. Many of President Obama’s jokes, his speechwriters should take note, were at the expense of his strengths—”I might lose my cool”—and were thus bordering on the narcissistic. (If I have a fault, and I’m the first to admit it, it’s probably this: I am too sweet and too patient and too tolerant of the mistakes of others.)

Well, Obama’s delivery was, I thought, rather good – we can’t expect him to be Woody Allen – but that’s a matter of taste. It’s true, however, that the president’s humor is often a touch narcissistic – especially when he cracks wise about his own narcissism. A regular feature of his stump routine these days is to brag comically about his wife’s beauty. “We can all agree that she should have the right to bare arms,” he quipped to the press corps. Quite funny, yes, and rather touching that he should be so proud of Michelle’s physical charms. But he shouldn’t perform this ain’t-I-lucky act too often: nobody likes a show off.