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April 24, 2000
WIND ON CAPITOL HILL: THE GUY
WHO MAKES THE PRESIDENT FUNNY |
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It is not, perhaps, the most important event in Bill Clintons
farewell tour of Washington, but April 29th marks
the presidents final speech at the White House Correspondents
Dinner, and thus the last time he delivers laughs on command.
As a consequence, the occasion is a turning point for a thirty-six
year old New Yorker named Mark Katz, who has served as Clintons
chief jokewriter for both tumultuous terms. "Its
been a remarkable window on this administration," Katz
said the other day over lunch. "I can tell you the joke
answer to every crisis thats come up the haircut,
the gays in the military, everything. Ive sat in front
of a word processor and tried to handle them all."
Katz is on the short side, built close to the ground, and he
is easily amused. (What, you expected Gary Cooper?) Like most
humorists, he began his career by getting thrown out of class
in the seventh grade, in his case in Rockland County, a place
Katz remembers as "a hotbed of social rest." After
college, he volunteered in the Dukakis campaign and soon found
himself a sort of comedy czar for that doomed undertaking. "Yes,
Im the man who made Mike Dukakis so funny," he said.
"When people say that campaign was a joke, I cant
help but feel a little proud."
Katz puttered around advertising for a few years, until in
1993, friends from the Dukakis campaign hooked him up with Clinton
for the annual round of after-dinner speeches at the
Gridiron, Radio & TV, and the White House Correspondents
Dinner where the President was expected to entertain
ballrooms full of grumpy reporters in evening dress. Katz has
come to see the speeches as kind of unofficial history of the
Clinton years. "He says stuff in those speeches that he
never would have said anywhere else. For example, the president
never admitted that he used the Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign
funds but at the 1996 Correspondents Dinner he said, "The
bad news is that our only child is going off to college. The
good news is, it opens up another bedroom." Last year,
Clinton winked at his well-known distaste for the correspondents
themselves, noting that if he had lost the impeachment vote
in the Senate he would not be appearing before them. "I
demand a recount," he intoned. There are, however, no jokes
about skirt-chasing.
Katz has turned his post as shtick-master general of the United
States into a one-man humor consulting operation he calls the
Sound Bite Institute. In addition to various corporate jobs,
Katz has consulted with Hillary Clinton and advised Al Gore
on a number of recent speeches. (Gore turned down one of his
more edgy offerings:
You know, the Washington Post just reported that I got Cs
and Ds in my sophomore year of college. But they failed
to report that that was also the year I invented the bong.")
Katzs fondest memory of his White House years concerns
a speech that Clinton did not give. "I was all set to do
the rehearsal for his White House Correspondents Speech
in 1995," Katz recalled, "and at the last minute they
decided it was too close to the Oklahoma City bombing for him
to do something funny. I was despondent. Then, a couple of minutes
later, I got a call that the President wanted to see me. I ran
back to the Oval Office, and he said "Lets just read
through it for laughs. And thats what he did. So
Ive been pitied at the highest levels. He felt my pain."
--Jeffrey Toobin
back to what the hell
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