Obama was not the first President to go on a comedy show.

[Cleita]

Remember "Rowan & Martin's Laugh In"? Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn got their starts on this show.

However, future President Richard Nixon, who already had been Vice President to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, made a brief appearance.

During the September 16, 1968 episode, Richard Nixon, running for president, appeared for a few seconds with a disbelieving vocal inflection, asking "Sock it to me?" Nixon was not doused or assaulted. An invitation was extended to Nixon's opponent, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, but he declined. According to George Schlatter, the show's creator, "Humphrey later said that not doing it may have cost him the election", and "[Nixon] said the rest of his life that appearing on Laugh-In is what got him elected. And I believe that. And I've had to live with that."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_%26_Martin's_Laugh-In

So Fox News STFU about this!

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Actually the Tricky One was on Laugh In two times, the second as a 'sitting President'

and that's the fact of the matter. As a kid, Laugh In got all of my attention, I used audio tape to record the episodes for later perusal....Nixon was the Most Hated of all GOP politicians in my house, a personal element around things he said to my Mother when he was Vice-President which she felt were out of line....
So twice he was on. Ford did SNL while 'sitting'. W did a game show and Dr Phil.
Other candidates or officials would go on talk shows if they had the skill set to make it work for them. They don't. Obama does. He's good on the talk shows when he does them. Really good.
On Laugh In, Nixon sucked, incidentally....

[Cleita]

2. Thanks for the memory jog.

I remembered Nixon doing 'sock it to me'. Thanks for filling in the others. But all the hyperbole about "no President ever went on a comedy show" is lies and I don't see any of our lefties pointing out that others Presidents have and they were GOOPs.