As funny as the times allow

Michael Schulder
CNN Senior Executive Producer

Tonight, Barack Obama will appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Will President Obama be funny? “As funny as the times allow,” said a White House official. How funny do these times allow one to be? We asked a similar question after 9/11. When can we laugh again? Following are some answers from Aristotle to Ackerman.

You can’t get funnier, given the times, than New York Congressman Gary Ackerman. Read what he said yesterday at the congressional hearings on the insurance giant AIG. He’s hilarious about the investment device that helped bring AIG and so much of the world economy to its knees — the credit default swap, based on collateral from subprime mortgages, which was pitched as a form of insurance.

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