Politics – occasionally a laughing matter

You might expect that politicians, all experienced public speakers and presumably likable people, could stand up and get a few laughs from an audience if you asked them to.

You might be wrong.

Every summer for 22 years now, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky has invited local candidates for office to get on stage for two minutes of stand up comedy to benefit Variety, the children’s charity.

And I’ve been to enough of Stu’s Candidates’ Comedy Nights to expect precious little from the pols, which probably says less about them than just how hard stand up comedy really is.

I went to last night’s event at Finnegan’s Wake, and convinced our talented videographer Lindsay Lazarski to bring a camera and come along. We had some fun and Lindsay produced the video above.

No mockery of these well-intentioned candidates is intended. I tried stand up once, and didn’t do any better than they did.

I’ll add that there was some funny material that was just too crude to share with you. And the bit of conservative Republican John Featherman about living with his Asian-American wife would fail most standards of ethnic sensitivity. But he got some laughs.

You might also enjoy the report of David Gambacorta in the Daily News. Enjoy.