Funny Business: Late Night Comics Target Romney Over Obama

Late night comedians have spent the past four years all but ignoring the President of the United States.

Why mock the most powerful man in the world when you can tease former President George W. Bush or even Sarah Palin?

Truth to (not in) power!

A new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs not only confirms how David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and their late night peers treat the current president but also how imbalanced the joke ratio really is.

Late night TV talk-show comedians have told more jokes about Mitt Romney than about all Democrats combined since the party nominating conventions, according to a new study of political humor by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). Overall, the study found that Republicans were the targets of jokes more than twice as often as Democrats, with the greatest disparity occurring in David Letterman’s monologues….

Mitt Romney was the target of 148 jokes on late night talk show monologues, over twice as many as President Obama. Obama finished second with 62 jokes.

The disparity was greatest on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” Letterman told 44 jokes about Romney and 9 about Obama, a five to one margin. But all four comedians told more Romney jokes than Obama jokes.

There were 290 jokes about Republicans, more than twice the 138 jokes about Democrats. The Top Ten joke targets included 5 Republicans and 3 Democrats.

For Barack Obama, being bypassed by TV’s humorists is nothing new. In the 2008 general election, CMPA found that he finished fourth with 243 jokes, behind GOP candidates John McCain (658), Sarah Palin (566), and outgoing president George W. Bush (244).