Last week Friday night at the Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association dinner, John Hodgman, the comedian perhaps best known as the PC in the ubiquitous Mac commercials, did a routine that played heavily on Barack Obama's nerdy side. There was a great sequence where Hodgman, skeptical of whether Obama was truly a nerd, accused the reporters of not asking the president the hard questions to determine his nerd credentials, and proceeded to administer a test of Obama's nerdiness, which used a nice slide show of photos. He got a Vulcan salute from the president. I admire Obama more than ever.
The audience reception was mixed--while, as Hodgman pointed out, all reporters may be nerds, I think a lot of Hodgman's jokes and references went over the heads of the many who were not geeks (though a great line from the speech: "I'm a big fat geek. And there are those of you who will say, 'Wait a minute, didn't he earlier say he's a nerd? There's a difference between geeks and nerds, of course,' and to you people I say 'Shut up nerds!'"). But Obama seemed to be amused by the performance--or at least he was very good at acting like he enjoyed it. And, being a nerd/geek myself, I was amused by the speech as well. It played well with various criticisms and things that have come up in the news, made lots of clever references, and had an interesting thesis as far as light comedy routines go.
I'm not always a fan of John Hodgman when I see him on the Daily Show, but he has enough good bits in this for it to be a worthwhile watch--if you're a geek and can understand all the jokes. Check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY
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