So I stayed in to watch Saturday Night Live last Saturday. I know you believe me, because, like my bio says, now I live at home with my parents. But that notwithstanding, I like to watch SNL, well, live. I'm sort of a news junkie and the 90 minutes of sketch comedy/whatever really tees up the Sunday morning talk shows for me. Remember that one Road Rules/Real World Challenge when Ayanna freaks out about sleeping in her game day clothes? Where she's so ready to compete that she sleeps in her uniform? Well, that's me every Saturday to Sunday. Except my uniform is sweatpants. And my competition is Jake Tapper tweeting about Peggy Noonan.

Right after the 2008 election, comedians and talk show hosts voiced their anxiety that Barack Obama was a tricky punch line. Which, of course, point taken. He talks pretty and exudes competence. In a post-post-post world, Barack Obama is just about post everything. SNL toyed with his coolness-his finesse and collectedness. But they eventually backed away. How much can you really skewer being calm?

Last season, Seth Myers and Co. introduced The Rock Obama, a character who upon irritation, mutates into the real-life The Rock. The joke here is that the President should be getting a lot more pissed off than he is at whoever is log-jamming whatever it is he is trying to accomplish that week. Alas, this sketch is really just another iteration of the "Barack Obama is basically put together" trope, and as a joke doesn't offer much.

I mean, it's possible no one is watching SNL anymore, and so I shouldn't be surprised when they come up short like this. But I kind of thought that, since Hulu, at least some of the cool kids were watching at least some of Andy Samberg's music videos. Plus, Tina Fey is only a few years removed from the program, and 30 Rock really is funny. I don't know. SNL doesn't feel like that time Janeane Garofalo was on the cast. But I watched it even then, so what do I really know? (Janeane? What do you think? Please let us know.)

Ten months into his first term, we at least do know the President better. That is, his foibles are more apparent now than they were when all we could say bad about him was that he was too cool. For instance, he says that he indulges in SportsCenter and declines chocolate-y desserts because they're too rich. Then there's that awkward Goldman Sachs entanglement. And, obviously, ever the Constitutional Law professor, Obama prefers teachable moments when it comes to racial profiling and Cambridge, Mass town-gown relations.

Then again, what was ever funny about having Skip Gates and his arresting Officer Crowley meet for beer in the White House's backyard? Come to think of it, what's funny about having press secretary Robert Gibbs list off the beer everyone would be drinking beforehand? What's funny about Skip Gates drinking beer? And really, what could be funny about Barack Obama talking to a cop? WTF.

If only Barack's teachable moments about race were more like those of Rush Limbaugh. You may have heard that Rush wants to buy the Saint Louis Rams. Last week, sportswriters were pissed off that Rush could situate himself like this, at the intersection of so much of what is fucked-up about race in this country. You know, professional sports. Never one for irony though, Rush scribbled off this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. When I scrolled through Slate's news aggregator, I saw that Rush opposes slavery, which surprised me. I was not, on the other hand, surprised that he wrote that calling people racist is a "cancer on our society." After Slate, I was all geared up to talk about metaphors-this being an English language column.

But I decided in fact to read the column before I trashed it. And I'm glad I did.

Rush knows what he is doing, and he has, I think, something to teach us about stock characters. These characters, you may remember, are not fully, humanly drawn. Think Wizard of Oz. Or The Real World. In his capacity as talking-head, Rush is more produced than probably even MTV's Road Rules/Real World Challenge. Just as we watch footage of CT having sex with Shauvon behind the house, interspersed with footage edited in of his then-girlfriend/cancer survivor Diem overhearing them, what we see of Rush is likewise terrible. MTV used the raw material of CT's buffoonery to create a villain-the CT we see on TV.

Likewise, Rush selects every word and codes many of his phrases deliberately; some would argue racist-ly. Take last week's WSJ column, for example. Rush opens with an Al Sharpton reference. He closes by calling the tea-baggers patriotic. He proclaims that he believes "in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race." For many of us (I'm looking at you, Janeane) Rush challenges the line of where parody meets reality. With both CT and Rush, the finished product is one fucking asshole of a stock character.

If Rush is a big fat moving target, Obama is a memoir he wrote his third year of law school worth of complexity. It's not so easy reducing him to one joke. A few months ago, David Gergen declared that the Obama presidency is the great political drama of our era. And why not? Beginning with the primaries, the action has been so fraught and the characters so rich. And with healthcare looming, we're left with one big climactic question. Olympia Snowe-are you a good witch or are you a bad witch?

Luke Mazur just can't quit living with his parents.