Stand-Up Comedy from George W. Bush

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With Saturday Night Live airing a re-run/compilation show, I thought I'd provide a flavor of the comedy stylings of former President George W. Bush -- made possible by a Vanity Fair article posted April 28 about Bush's post-presidential life. “George in Real Life: George W. Bush takes on his most daunting challenge yet: his own legacy,” by Nancy Jo Sales, is informative -- if you can overlook or get around the incessant and gratuitous belittling remarks from Sales who treated Bill Maher as an expert on Bush's legacy.

She did, however, helpfully relay three jokes Bush delivered during his first public appearance on March 17 in Calgary. So, conjure up a drum roll...

♦ The former President says that his first day home in Preston Hollow, the suburb of Dallas where he and his wife moved in January, he kicked back on the couch and hollered, “Baby, free at last!” To which Laura responded, “‘Yeah, you’re free to take out the trash. Consider it your new domestic policy agenda.’” Big laugh. A woman at my table mouths, “He’s so funny!”

♦ “Barney made a deposit in the yard,” he says, adding that when he bent down to retrieve it with a plastic bag, he got to thinking, “I was dodging this stuff for eight years — now I’m picking it up!” The crowd goes wild on that one.

♦ Onstage in Calgary, Bush played up his winning down-to-earthness with a story about taking a trip to his local hardware store, where the owner, Kyle Walters, offered him a job as a “greeter.” “And a guy in there says to me, ‘Hey, did anybody ever tell you you look like George W. Bush?’” Bush said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, man, happens all the time.’ And the guy says, ‘Oh, that must make you mad!’” Big laugh there.