The President Needs A New Punchline!

Episode One: The Legend of Ed

My good friend, Ed, calls me.

He tells me that the President has this event in the spring called the Gridiron Club Dinner. It’s a swanky, non-partisan, black-tie DC event where the Democrats roast the Republicans, and the Republicans roast the Democrats. It’s all very collegial, which seems a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

This is the spring of 1989, and it’s the first one hundred days of the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who at that time was known simply as George Bush.

The Legend of Ed

I got to know Ed McNally well during our senior year at Yale. He was born into an Irish Catholic family, the oldest son in a family of ten kids. His father was a prominent surgeon, who during the Vietnam War was the doctor that operated on the young Vietnamese girl from that haunting, iconic photograph running naked, arms outstretched, with burns all over her body after a deadly napalm attack.[1][2]

Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Ed was a neighbor of filmmaker, John Hughes,[3] and claims to be the real-life inspiration for Ferris Bueller.[4]

I know Ed.

I believe him.

Although mere fiction cannot contain Ed. In his last semester of high school, Ferris had nine unexcused absences. Ed had twenty-seven.

I know Ed McNally. Ed McNally is a friend of mine. Ferris Bueller is no Ed McNally.

I didn’t get to know Ed that well until my senior year, because he matriculated in the class ahead of me. He had fallen back into my class after he, along with fourteen others from my residential college, masterminded an elaborate Bladderball[5] prank on a rival residential college during Yale/Princeton football weekend that resulted in that notorious commando unit, known as the “Saybrook 15,” getting suspended for a year.

After graduation, Ed worked on George H.W. Bush’s Republican primary campaign and then for a time in the Reagan Justice Department.

In the mid-eighties, Ed was teaching U.S. Constitutional Law at Beijing University — the Harvard of China — when he and a New York Times journalist got arrested for taking a joyride on Ed’s Chinese army motorcycle with sidecar into unauthorized territory.[6] Charged with espionage, the South China Morning Post dubbed it the “Motorcycle Spy Mission.”[7] When Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schultz, made an official trip to China, one of the items on his agenda was to get Ed’s motorcycle back.

After being expelled from China, Ed returned to the Justice Department to work as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the famous Southern District of New York.

Under Rudy Giuliani.

I always thought Ed had political aspirations of his own until he moved from the East Coast to Alaska to become the District Attorney in Anchorage. I teased him that Alaska may not be the best base of operations for future elective office. My apartment building in Queens had more electoral votes than Alaska. Turns out Ed did not aspire to elective office and although a Republican, never struck me as particularly ideological. In fact, his wife Monique is a flaming liberal. She allows Ed to appear on Fox News. He’s just not allowed to watch it. It’s hard for me to imagine not getting married along party lines.

In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush appointed Ed general counsel for the newly formed Homeland Security Council at the White House, the predecessor of DHS.

More recently, while working in the prominent New York law firm that represented Donald Trump, Kasowitz Benson and Torres, he was the mystery man, outed by then Senator Kamala Harris during the confirmation hearings of. Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Ed and Kavanaugh knew each other from George W. Bush White House days in the early aughts. Harris and other Dems on the Judiciary Committee accused Kavanaugh of having inappropriate discussions with his old colleague about the Mueller investigation.

Ed may also be Forrest Gump.

But back in the spring of 1989, Ed was one of the recently inaugurated President George H.W. Bush’s speechwriters.

The Assignment

Unlike the Correspondents Dinner, which is televised, and the jokes dissected on cable news, the Gridiron Club Dinner is truly an Inside the Beltway affair not available to the general public. The President had a writer from the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson who wrote stuff for him, but Ed thought someone like me might be able to inject a younger sensibility into the President’s speech. I didn’t vote for George H. W. Bush, but this seemed like a harmless exercise in service to my country. What’s the worst I could do? Make the President of the United States funnier?

Ed sent me pages of raw material, jokes the communications department had brainstormed. It was a lot of inside jokes about people who the President was hiring to be in his Administration. I didn’t write anything original. I merely sharpened and reshaped what they had, putting it into more of a set-up/punchline rhythm.

A few weeks later, Ed called again.

“The President likes this one joke, but he wants to rework it.”

It was a joke about a genial, well-liked senior White House aide, named Fred McClure. It was enough of an inside joke at the time and now has the added disadvantage of being incredibly dated. Apparently, Fred had various times in his career worked for three very different but all very controversial and notorious men, Edwin Meese, Frank Lorenzo, and John Tower. Meese had been Reagan’s Attorney General best known for his 1,960-page report that declared that pornography was bad. Or made you go blind. I don’t remember exactly. At the time Frank Lorenzo was the CEO of the ill-fated Eastern Airlines battling with unions and trying to stave off bankruptcy. And John Tower was a former Senator from Texas and Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Defense recently rejected after the FBI uncovered information about alcohol abuse, womanizing, and taking money from the defense industry.

The joke the speechwriters had come up with for Bush was, “So whenever I go to the track, I find out which horse Fred is betting on, and I bet on the other horse.”

The President didn’t like the metaphor, and I give him credit. His instinct was correct. Bush was not a guy you’d picture at the track. He was more American Sportsman. I might have spotted that today, but back then my young sensibility also came with an equal measure of inexperience. My assignment? Come up with a better punchline about Fred.

Ed told me that he was meeting with the President in the Oval Office the next afternoon, so I needed to get the joke to him by then. In the meantime, he was going to be traveling on Amtrak from New York to Washington and unreachable. These were pre-cell phone days when we lived like animals.

He planned to call me the next morning for the goods. I gave him the number of my in-laws’ house in Princeton NJ, because that’s where Shelley and I and our one-year-old son would be visiting in the morning.

Then, I started working in a spiral notebook[8] on all sorts of variations of the joke.

Princeton

The next morning, I had two pages filled with variations. For me, the key was to figure what the three notorious men who Fred had worked for had in common. They were all in different fields, Meese the righteous Attorney General, Lorenzo, the tough union-busting CEO, and Tower, the creepy politician. No obvious throughline there. My instinct took me away from their professions and the events of their careers to their characters or my projection of what they must be like as people. One variation covered that and felt right. I put a star next to it.

Then I waited for Ed’s call. Morning passed. No call.

In the thriller movie version of this story over an establishing shot of Shelley’s parents’ house, we’d see a chyron typed out on the screen:

Friday… 12:01pm

At loose ends, Shelley and I decide we’re going to take our toddler to J.C. Penney to get a family portrait picture taken.

ARIAL SHOT OF ROUTE 1 JUST OUTSIDE OF PRINCETON.

Quakerbridge Mall… 12:23pm

When we got there, we found out that you just can’t walk in. You needed to make an appointment, which we couldn’t get on such short notice.

Dumb young parents.

As long as we were out, we decided to call Shelley’s mom to let her know she didn’t have to worry about making us lunch. Shelley’s mom, Dana, was like a second mother to me, smart, supportive, interesting to talk to, a sculptor, and a social worker, one of the greatest listeners of all time, who put that skill to good use volunteering on a suicide hotline. Just a model of a moral, ethical person in addition to being a fabulous cook. But this day, we thought we’d give her the afternoon off and eat at the food court.

We found a phone.[9] Dana answered in a panic. Ed had called from the White House. He was meeting with the President in an hour, and he needed the joke. Dana told him where we were.

Ed sighed, “Let it go down in history that when Steve Skrovan’s President needed him… he was at the mall.”

Dana told us she had tried to have us paged[10] over the public address system at the mall. We obviously hadn’t heard the page. But she found the notebook I had been working in. She read him all of the variations. Ed liked the one I had starred. He took it to the President.

And the Republic was saved.

The new joke was “Fred at various times has worked for Ed Meese, Frank Lorenzo, and John Tower. So I go to Fred whenever I want to rub somebody the wrong way.”

Maybe not funny to you. But in the context of The Gridiron Club audience, coming from the President of the United States of America, it killed.

The really funny part was Dana’s conversation with the switchboard operator[11] at the mall. She told the operator she needed someone paged and that it was an emergency.

The switchboard operator said that before she could put it through, “You have to tell me what the emergency is.”

And Dana, one of the most guileless people who ever lived, told the truth.

“Well,” she said, “My son-in-law’s a comedian. He’s writing jokes for the President. And the President needs a new punch line.”

The switchboard operator laughed and immediately put the page through.

Because, who’s going to make that up?

Coming tomorrow! Part Two

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[1] Dr. McNally didn’t know this until decades later when the Vietnamese woman tracked him down to thank him for saving her life. https://chicago.suntimes.com/obituaries/2022/7/29/23283693/randall-mcnally-plastic-surgeon-napalm-girl-vietnam-kim-phuc-phan-thi-chicago-blackhawks

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103453.html

[4] Ferris Bueller’s Day Off https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/

[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bladderball

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/magazine/a-reporter-s-odyssey-in-unseen-china.html

[7] Ed told me that when he and the British reporter – two time Pulitzer Prize winning NYT foreign correspondent John F Burns- were being interrogated by the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China)chief anti-espionage General an exasperated Burns said,  “Gen. Zhang, you had an English reporter, an American lawyer, and a Chinese actor tearing across the North China plains in a Keystone Cops motorcycle-and-sidecar, flying – mind you – a Chicago Cubs pennant. If we were spies, surely, we rank as amongst the greatest bunglers in the history of the trade!” Zhang replied with a straight face: “Maybe you are a very special kind of spy.”

[8] Spiral notebook?! No cell phones!? Unreachable!? Animals! We lived like animals, I tell you!

[9] In the old days, they had these things called “pay phones.” You had to place a coin in a slot. Available to the public. Hordes of strangers putting their mouths up to the same receiver. We were animals, I say!

[10] If we had cell phones, email, Find My Friend, and texting back then, this story would have no drama.

[11] Ibid.