Projects (2003-Current) > Joke Research Archive: President Barack H. Obama’s Prepared Remarks White House Correspondents’ Dinners, 2009-2016 (2017)

Jokes are dissected from each speech President Barack Obama gave at eight consecutive White House Correspondents’ Dinners, and a resulting taxonomy is created that imagines the topics and tangents purportedly researched by the President’s speechwriting staff prior to the drafting of the jokes.

This speculative archive was shown in The Presidential Library Project: Black Presidential Imaginary, an exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and organized by Jane Addams Hull-House Museum Curator Ross Jordan. The exhibition addressed the long history of representations of a black president of the United States in visual culture, both comedic and aspirational, through contemporary art installation and institutional archives.

Joke Research Archive: President Barack H. Obama’s Prepared Remarks White House Correspondents’ Dinners, 2009-2016
12 cardboard woodgrain bankers boxes, labels, paper
Each box: 10 inches (height) x 15 inches (length) x 12 inches (depth)
2017
(detail) Joke Research Archive: President Barack H. Obama’s Prepared Remarks White House Correspondents’ Dinners, 2009-2016
12 cardboard woodgrain bankers boxes, labels, paper
Each box: 10 inches (height) x 15 inches (length) x 12 inches (depth)
2017
(detail) Joke Research Archive: President Barack H. Obama’s Prepared Remarks White House Correspondents’ Dinners, 2009-2016
12 cardboard woodgrain bankers boxes, labels, paper
Each box: 10 inches (height) x 15 inches (length) x 12 inches (depth)
2017