{"id":7349,"date":"2011-05-01T09:40:37","date_gmt":"2011-05-01T09:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/01\/too-professoria\/"},"modified":"2011-05-01T09:40:37","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T09:40:37","slug":"too-professoria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/01\/too-professoria\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Professorial"},"content":{"rendered":"\u23f3 Approximate reading time: <\/span> < 1<\/span> min<\/span><\/span>

For all of the expected political-carnival reasons and more, Obama’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner opening remarks offers quite the epideictic flurry: what<\/em> a week. Sure, I found it funny, but by the end I was thinking more along the lines of speech-type and classification, asking, in effect, What was that? Strange, patriotic mash-up video with pulsing birth certificate to open, more birther-fringe comedic jabs, a Lion King rickroll, a parenthetical clarification to the Fox News table, and then direct riffing on The Donald and his election aspirations (essentially, a roast!), then a groaner, the swipe at NPR’s funding solidity, a spoof movie trailer about delivery, teleprompters, and keeping to script (riffing on VP Biden), and then a stark switch-up, an honorific to journalists, and a somber tribute to military personal and those affected by the tragic tornadoes in Alabama and the SE U.S. It adds up insofar as it happened in an uninterrupted 20 minutes, but it also displays a degree of variability and rhetorical versatility (even if it was scripted, maybe especially because it was scripted) that I found, well, noticeable. How, then, to classify such a moment?<\/p>\n