This might be the most singular book in my collection, despite my owing many scarce titles that can’t even be found on the internet any longer. While there are probably a library’s load of books making fun of presidents, Humor and the Presidency is the only book of humor that has ever been written by a president. Deliberately, that is.
No need for a biography here. Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. is hardly as forgotten as George Ade or Chic Sale, although it’s hard to believe that he became president more than 50 years ago. Ford of course became president upon the resignation of Richard Nixon and then soon pardoned him, earning him the scorn of much of the country and the media.
The constant jokes took a toll. According to a December 27, 2006 Seattle Times article by Bruce Fessier:
Gerald Ford claimed he became an authority on American humor after being skewered by those who used it for a living.
He conducted a seminar on “Humor and the Presidency” at the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library in Michigan and wrote a book with that title from his office in Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., in the 1980s.
HBO filmed the three-day seminar filled with comic talents like Chevy Chase, Pat Paulsen, Robert Klein, Art Buchwald, Mort Sahl, Mark Russell, and the Capitol Steps.
The slim book is partly a history of presidential humor, both by and hurled toward presidents, and partly a large selection of political cartoons spanning the century between Thomas Nast and Berke Breathed. Ford had access to presidential scriptwriters, political reporters, and members of his administration and included several-page-long quotes from them that fill in the scene from the other side of the curtain. You almost certainly will not see presidential humor through the eyes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney in any other book.
I’m loath to accept a celebrity’s name on any book purportedly written by them: ghostwriters are almost inevitably behind the project. Yet no evidence has ever surfaced that anybody but Ford himself created the results. I’ll let the statement rest there.
Bibliography of Humorous Works
- 1987 – Humor and the Presidency
Great Forgotten Humorists 
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