President Obama is funny. We’ve all seen the correspondents’ dinners. But was he always that way?
A witty article from the Harvard Law Revue, a parody publication put out annually by the real Law Review’s graduating class, suggests his sense of humor was alive and well in 1990. In a piece entitled, “Between Barack and a Hard Place: My First Hundred Days,” Obama — reportedly using the pseudonym “Baroque Yo’ Mama” — joked that he was born in Oslo, Norway, to a Jewish Volvo factory worker and a backup singer for Abba. Mr. Yo’ Mama goes on:
As you folks all know, I am extraordinarily mature, and at the age of fifteen I went off to California to enroll at Accidental College. After a couple of years, I decided to go to Colombia, but when offered a position as a judge in Bogota, I fled to Chicago. There I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since.
The piece is sharp, stealthily self-deprecating in the way Ricky Gervais would make famous a decade later, and hysterical. It overflows with pun-filled faux footnotes, and various variations on Barack, Baruch, Baroque Yo’ Mama’s name. The whole thing is worth a read. (Thanks to Buzzfeed for digging this one up.)
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