I don’t know how you spend your time on the press plane,” said President Ford a few days ago at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington. “All I know is, every time I call I say ‘This is the President,’ and a voice answers, ‘I’ll drink to that.’ ” The crowd of 1,700 roared—music to the rather prominent ears of gaunt, balding Robert Orben.
Bob Orben, 48, is Gerald Ford’s gag writer. Listed formally as one of six presidential speech writers, Orben manufactures the jokes that have given Ford a reputation as the quickest man with one-liners in the White House since John Kennedy.
Orben sees his job in patriotic terms. “In this day and age,” he says, solemnly, “it’s almost un-American not to have a sense of humor.” For years he was a supplier of gags for TV celebrities such as Red Buttons, Jack Paar, Dick Gregory and Red Skelton. Orben first collaborated with Ford in 1968, when the then congressman from Michigan learned that Orben wrote for the Skelton TV show, a Ford favorite. After that Orben composed occasional speeches for Ford over the years. Last August, the President, eager to lighten the mood of the White House after the morbid months of Watergate, put Orben on the payroll. “The President,” says Orben, “has a quick, natural and playful sense of humor. He feels humor is a loving way to communicate. If you can laugh together, you can work together. You don’t laugh with someone you mistrust.”
The Orben-Ford humor is gentle, obvious and aimed at political friend and foe alike. Some samples:
•A great philosopher once said—I think it was Henry Kissinger—nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s just too much fraternizing with the enemy.
•Ronald Reagan doesn’t dye his hair. It’s just prematurely orange.
•I couldn’t find my program, so I leaned over to the man sitting next to me and asked, “What follows Senator Humphrey?” He looked at his watch and said, “Christmas.”
•Being Vice-President is almost like being best man at a wedding. You never get a chance to prove it.
•You know all those Secret Service men you’ve seen around me? When I play golf, they get combat pay.
Ford’s self-deprecating style of humor, says Orben, is a healthy barometer of inner security. Orben, who lives eight blocks from the White House, rehearses lines, timing and gestures with the President. But, he quickly notes, “the material is a reflection of the President’s own humor, not mine. I talk to his family and associates and build up a file of his thoughts on subjects.”
Orben has a massive collection of wisecracks invented and gathered over three decades. At age 18 the Bronx-born Orben began demonstrating tricks in a New York magic shop. “I never had the money to buy rabbits,” he laments, “and anyway, they always did vile things at the bottom of the cages.” Chronic stage fright cut short Orben’s own performing career, so he began writing routines for witless magicians. His first book, The Encyclopedia of Patter, was so successful it led to 42 others like it.
Orben’s job at the White House leaves him enough time to write and edit for two humor services which provide zingers for “hundreds” of subscribing lawmakers—whom Orben discreetly will not identify.
He does not hesitate to name those politicians whose humor he admires. “Hubert Humphrey is excellent and Rockefeller has a good comedy style,” says Orben. He liked Nixon, too. “He was quite effective in the use of humor in the early days. We lose sight of this fact,” says Orben, who adds sadly, “but he was like a performer who outlasted his time in show business.”