The transcripts of the Wanda Sykes jokes seemed pretty pathetic (will the aide that pre-approved her text go the way of Louis Caldera?). Comedy is not quite given its usual free-for-all when you’re in front of the president of the United States — and his own public worldwide reaction is an instant referendum on not merely the funniness of the joke but its probity as well. In that context, laughing as Sykes called Rush Limbaugh a traitor, drug-addict, a terrorist, and wished for him to die by kidney failure (no laughing matter as I can attest from two major kidney surgeries) was well over the top of anything in the past at those silly dinners — and it did the President of the United States no good to join in at that crassness before the world. So much for the healing and unity.

But more importantly, Sykes only got her cue from Obama’s strange obsession with talk radio. Throughout the campaign, in unusual fashion, Obama for some strange reason kept bringing up Hannity (the tapes are now enshrined in his radio talk show lead-ins) and Limbaugh by name, in tit-for-tat, back-and-forth fashion, and then zeroed in on Limbaugh again after he was president.

It is long past time that the president of the United States forgets talk radio, and then maybe the likes of Sykes will get the message. Somehow all this seems like a bad joke.