No matter where he is on the campaign trail, Sen. Marco Rubio loves to tell the story of paying college debt years after he graduated law school — and he loves to tell them how he got out of it.
“I believe I’m the only Republican candidate that consistently talks about student loan debt, and one of the reasons why is because three years ago I still owed over $100,000 in student loan debt,” he said at a town hall event in South Carolina last week. “Which I was only able to pay off because I wrote a book. It’s called “An American Son,” now available in paperback.
“People always laugh. I love that joke — it’s not a joke, it is available in paperback,” he said.
It’s been a staple of his stump speech for more than three years, only updating it with the “paperback” line, and it still gets a hearty chuckle from audiences — so much so that the GOP presidential hopeful has begun joking about the fact that he’s still using it.
“It works, it always works, that’s why I keep saying it. If something is true and it works, you should keep saying it over and over again,” he said.
The experts said he’s exactly right about that calculation.
“For a politician, the shelf life for a joke is forever,” said Donnell Rawlings, a stand-up comic who starred on “Chappelle’s Show. “As long as it works, it is a good joke.”
As long as there are new audiences, there will be people for whom the joke is new, and as long as Mr. Rubio or any other politician can keep his delivery fresh, he’s fine, Mr. Rawlings said.
And being able to pull off humor can be powerful for candidates who otherwise are trapped in a bubble, traveling with advisers and strategists and dealing with strategy and policy that’s often beyond what voters need, or want, to hear.
Landing a well-oiled joke can help bridge that gap.
“It does several things,” said Landon Parvin, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. “It provides a connection with the audience. If it is a self-deprecating joke, it shows that you don’t take yourself too seriously. It can be used to make a point, and it keeps the speech moving. There are any number of reasons to use humor.”
Missing the mark on a joke, though, can have the opposite effect — just ask former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who displayed an awkward sense of humor on the campaign trail before pulling the ripcord on his campaign over the weekend.
“He seems like an honest person,” Mr. Rawlings said. “If he had more confidence in being funny, his personality would come out more.”
Mr. Rawlings said retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson “reminds me of the last guy you want to tell the joke,” while businessman Donald Trump “reminds me of the guy you want to hear the joke from because you know he takes pride and he wants to kill it.”
As for Hillary Clinton, he said, “She seems like she tries too hard.”
Political analysts say Reagan, a former actor, masterfully used humor.
Elected at 69, he poked fun at his own age, assuring members of Congress in his first State of the Union address that he was not around to hear George Washington kick off the tradition in 1790.
President Obama also has won praise for his delivery — so much so that Mr. Rawlings said the president could win a “Last Comic Standing”-type competition.
Mr. Rawlings said a big difference between comedians and candidates is that politicians need to be squeaky-clean with their jokes; comics don’t.
“If I don’t offend a person, I haven’t had a good show,” he said.
Yannis Pappas, a stand-up who has had specials on Comedy Central and performed on “The Tonight Show,” said that his goal is to make people laugh and forget their problems when they are drunk, while a politician is trying to fill them with hope and win their votes when they are, in most cases, sober.
“That makes the joke very hard, considering what the goal is for telling the joke,” Mr. Pappas said.
The exceptions are self-deprecating humor and jokes that poke at other politicians.
Mr. Rubio has become adept at both, jabbing at the serious-looking Rep. Trey Gowdy, a supporter of his and a favorite in South Carolina, by joking that they had to hold up a speech at a strip mall because Mr. Gowdy was at the studio next door finishing up hot yoga.
Sen. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, has taken to firing at a number of his opponents, including the Obama administration, over its fight with a charity of nuns over birth control rules under Obamacare.
“A pretty good rule of thumb, by the way, if you are suing nuns, you’ve done something really wrong,” Mr. Cruz has said — in various formulations — on numerous occasions.
“The problem is most politicians have the personalities of soap dishes, so it is really hard for them to tell a joke in the first place,” said Mike McKenna, a GOP strategist.
“Nobody in any politician’s inner circle is ever going to tell them, ’No one is laughing at that joke anymore, you have to move along,’ and also because it is not like they come up with 100 funny things a day every day,” he said.
“They are stiff and boring. The boring guy at the party, he is going to repeat something that he thinks is funny because he can’t think of anything else that is funny,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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