Joke Writer: Laura Bush Has Never Watched "Desperate Housewives"

From IHT.com

When Laura Bush wise-cracked at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner on Saturday night that she was a "desperate housewife" married to a man who was sound asleep by 9 p.m., a slight, worried man stood in the wings hanging on to every line. As well he might, since he had written most of them for the first lady's inaugural act as a stand-up comic.

Judging from the laughter at her words - "George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw, which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well" - Landon Parvin, joke writer to the political stars, could relax.

Bush not only made fun of her husband (and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) but also of her mother-in-law, the former first lady Barbara Bush, whom she likened to Don Corleone in "The Godfather."

She described time spent at her in-laws' summer home in Maine like this: "First prize, three days' vacation with the Bush family. Second prize, 10 days."

Parvin, who normally writes jokes for the president, also wrote jokes and presidential speeches for Ronald Reagan and is remembered in Washington for the lyrics to "Secondhand Clothes," the song that Nancy Reagan performed at the 1982 correspondents' dinner lampooning her taste in designers.

Although Parvin was loath to speak about how he cooked up one-liners for the current first lady - "I shouldn't be talking, I like being my little mole-ish self" - he did speak before and after the dinner about presidential stand-up comedy in general.

"In the scheme of things, it's not important," Parvin said. "But everybody wants to do well. Someone said humor is like standing up naked in front of an audience, then turning around and saying, 'What do you think?"'

The one advantage that he has in writing for presidents, he said, is that it's easier to get a laugh. "I noticed it first with Reagan," Parvin said. "Reagan would come into the East Room, and he would have a little throwaway line, and it would get a laugh, and it wouldn't have gotten a laugh with most people. What it did was break the tension. It's the unexpected, I guess. People don't expect presidents to be funny."

In Bush's case, her routine was her husband's idea. Tradition calls for the president to deliver one-liners to the 2,500 White House correspondents and guests at the Gridiron dinner in the Washington Hilton ballroom, but Bush has now done that three times. His wife agreed to step in, then sat down with Parvin and Susan Whitson, her press secretary, to work on ideas.

Playing off "Desperate Housewives," the racy hit U.S. television show, was a natural, even though Whitson said in a brief interview after the dinner that Bush had never actually seen it. Whitson said the first lady had heard about the characters and plot from her twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, who are fans, and was planning to watch the entire first season on a DVD she has at home.

Once Parvin finished his script, Bush had several days of rehearsals, including one shortly before the dinner. She went on right after dessert, as the president was at the lectern launching into his worst jokes from the 2004 campaign.

Laura Bush suddenly got up and "interrupted" her husband, saying "not that old joke, not again." Then she added, as the audience laughed: "I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting there. I've got a few things I want to say for a change." Whitson said that while the president was in on the setup, he did not know what his wife would say, and he reacted mostly by guffawing with a bright red face.

Parvin, who said writing a speech about the Iran-contra scandal was a lot easier than writing jokes, termed self-deprecating humor essential for presidents. As a joke writer, he said, his most important task is to meld personality and topicality.

"First of all, you get the person's character in your head," he said. "But a lot depends on what's going on at the time. It's just a feeling that's in the air. So you take that feeling and distill it down to lines that reflect the perception of that person's character."

Parvin, 56, writes for Republicans but also for Democrats whom he likes, such as Bill Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan and Robert Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He is the son of a University of Illinois accountant and says that he was a well-liked but unfunny misfit growing up. In 1981, he was writing for the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm when he got a job as a Reagan speechwriter.

He now writes serious speeches for politicians and executives from his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but is called in every year to do Bush's routines for four Washington events: the Gridiron; the Alfalfa Club; a radio and television correspondents' dinner; and the White House press dinner. Bush, he said, "works on the script, and practices, and takes it seriously." Parvin (and the president) have had one recent bomb, however: Bush's joke at the radio and television dinner last year that "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere" as a slide showed the president rummaging under the Oval Office furniture.

Parvin, who said his job is to remain in the background, begged off having his picture taken.

"Just say I look like a withered Brad Pitt," he said.