At a White House reception on Monday recognizing LGBT Pride Month, President Obama gave a shout-out to White House executive pastry chef “Bill Yosses — who’s here tonight with his husband, Charlie.”
Calling Yosses “the Crust Master,” Obama said, “His pies … I don’t know what he does … whether he puts crack in them or … um … but …”
Michelle Obama quickly interjected, “No he doesn’t. There is no crack in our pies.”
The crowd roared with laughter at the president’s drug joke and chuckled when Obama blamed the pasty chef’s pies for his rising cholesterol during his first term. Obama added that they established a “no pie during the week” rule at the White House as a result.
The president expressed his regret that Yosses will be leaving the White House after seven years, and he wished Bill and Charlie the best of luck.
This isn’t the first time President Obama has joked about drugs. At the 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he said, “But the problem is that the media landscape is changing so rapidly. You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when Buzzfeed was just something I did in college around 2 a.m.”
At a 2013 Kennedy Center Honors Reception in the East Room of the White House, the president joked about Carlos Santana’s drug use at Woodstock.
When a 22-year-old Carlos Santana took the stage at Woodstock, few people outside his hometown of San Francisco knew who he was. And the feeling was mutual. Carlos was in such a — shall we say — altered state of mind that he remembers almost nothing about the other performers. He thought the neck of his guitar was an electric snake.
The crowd at the reception laughed and applauded. The president went on to suggest that Santana’s drug use may have enhanced his Woodstock performance:
But that did not stop Carlos and his band from whipping the crowd into a such frenzy with a mind-blowing mix of blues, and jazz, and R&B, and Latin music. They’d never heard anything like it. And almost overnight, Carlos Santana became a star.
In 2012 President Obama made a promotional video for the DNC Convention in which he “called” actor Kal Penn, the former associate director of public engagement for the Obama administration. On a split screen, Penn is seen with his Harold and Kumar co-star John Cho. The two are surrounded by junk food, suggesting that, like the characters in the Harold and Kumar films, Cho and Penn are stoned. At the time BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller said it was “perhaps the most direct appeal ever for the pothead vote.”
We’ve evolved from Nixon’s “War on Drugs” to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No to Drugs” to our president joking about his and others’ drug use.
Hilarious.
Watch the convention video on the next page.
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