The news that the Nobel Prize Committee has just awarded the coveted Peace Prize to President Barack Obama immediately put me in mind of an anecdote recounted by Margaret MacMillan in her book Nixon and Mao,

During the Cultural Revolution, an American remarked casually on an attractive view to a Chinese diplomat, who promptly answered, “Yes, it is; but not as beautiful as it is in Beijing where the glorious sun of Chairman Mao Tse-tung shines upon the Chinese people twenty-four hours a day.” Years later, after Mao’s death, the two men met again in Tanzania. The Chinese looked at the American and said, “It is a beautiful day, but not as beautiful as it is in Beijing where the glorious sun of…” and started to laugh. “I look back often on that conversation,” he said. “By God, how stupid it was.”

Besides being amusing, this story illustrates an important point: All cults of personality begin as high drama and end as low comedy. In Obama’s case, of course, there has always been an element of farce to his public persona. Watching his speeches may have been tear-jerking for some, but at times one could not help but be reminded of the classic scene in The Candidate in which Robert Redford’s young, idealistic senatorial hopeful sits in the back of a car mumbling nonsensical platitudes from his stump speech until he is finally reduced to incomprehensible babbling. The film also has the added benefit of foreshadowing the benefits of such an approach. “He’s not gonna lose,” Redford’s ward-boss father tells a union delegate at one point, “he’s cute.” Indeed, there is no doubt that being glamorously vacuous was key to Obama’s appeal and eventual victory.

Despite electoral success, however, the candidate and his supporters, indeed the entire Obama phenomenon, often seemed to have walked right out of a Monty Python sketch. The fainting, the crying, Chris Mathews’s vaguely homoerotic tremors up his leg, the slathering, worshipful press corps doing their level best to explain that the whackjob preacher and the geriatric terrorist were just local eccentrics, the exhortations about the rise of the oceans slowing and the planet healing, the acceptance speech delivered in front of a mini-Parthenon, all served to create an atmosphere in which at any moment one expected to see a rather stout gentleman in drag step out from behind the curtain and shriek, “He’s not the messiah! He’s a very naughty boy! Now piss off!” Nonetheless, there is a law of diminishing returns at work in such things, and the Nobel Prize committee may have inadvertently done us the service of finally drawing the line between tragedy and comedy. With this announcement, Obama and his supporters have officially become a joke.

The punchline is easy enough to find, since it is contained in the will of Alfred Nobel himself, who established the peace prize with the stipulation that it should be given “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” One assumes that the phrase “done the most or the best work” implies very strongly that the price should be awarded to someone who has actually accomplished something. In all fairness, this has usually been the case with Nobel laureates. There is no denying that the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Jane Addams, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrei Sakharov, Mother Theresa, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, and Lech Walesa, among many others, actually did manage to do things like conclude peace treaties, expose or bring down tyrannical governments, and contribute to the health and prosperity of others on a large scale.

Obama, by contrast, has precisely two concrete accomplishments to his credit: letting the military do its job with a handful of Somali pirates, and pumping enormous amounts of money into the American economy, thus far with inconclusive results. At best, the jury is still out on everything else he has attempted. On the issues that tend to interest the Nobel committee, this particularly apparent. His engagement of the Iranians has lead nowhere; his efforts toward peace in the Middle East have proved an embarrassing failure; his pledge to reverse Bush-era security policies and close Guantanamo Bay has been, ironically, reversed; the withdrawal from Iraq is precarious; he has snubbed fellow peace prize-winner the Dalai Lama; in regard to Darfur, North Korea, Pakistan, and other trouble spots, he has done nothing; he has made no decision whatsoever in regard to Afghanistan, and will most likely pursue not peace but an escalated war; and his relationship to European leaders is already deeply strained, to the point that the president of France, of all places, has criticized him for being too soft on the Iranian issue. Given all this, it is difficult to conclude that the Nobel committee’s decision is anything other than the final nail in the coffin of Obamamania, a “we’re bigger than Jesus” moment scripted like the final scene from Duck Soup, with the committee and all who sail in her replacing the “Hail Freedonia!”-singing matron being pelted with mud by the Marx Brothers.

If the New York Times is anything to go by (and the Grey Lady is always good for a laugh) the committee has all but admitted as much in an unintentionally hilarious series of statements, which are only further enhanced by the fact that its chairman is a gentleman known as Thorbjorn Jagland, which cannot but bring to mind Peter Sellers’s prescient remark to Keenan Wynn in Dr. Strangelove, “Look, Colonel ‘Bat Guano’, if that really is your name….” According to both the Grey and the Lady, the committee claims to have awarded Obama the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and asserts that “he has created a new international climate.” Both statements, to the extent that the committee actually believes them at all, seem calculated for an immediate spit take and pie in the face from Iran, North Korea, Israel, the Palestinians, Afghanistan, the Dalai Lama, and Nicholas Sarkozy, amongst others, not to mention a couple of Somali pirates with bullets in their heads.

To give them some credit, however, the committee’s announcement is not all slapstick. As the Times points out, “The committee said it wanted to enhance Mr. Obama’s diplomatic efforts. ‘We are awarding Obama for what he has done,’ the committee said. ‘Many other people and leaders and nations have to respond in a positive way’ to President Obama’s diplomacy.” This statement alone could stand as a model of subtle irony, since diplomacy no one responds to is, by definition, a failure and not an accomplishment. But before being yanked offstage by the cane-wielding emcee, the committee had a grand finale in store,

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

As should be obvious to all, this windy missive refers to absolutely nothing that Obama has actually done. At best, it praises him for such amorphous accomplishments as “giving people hope,” “capturing the world’s attention,” “stimulating” (your guess is as good as mine), and having a “vision” the committee finds amenable. None of these things amount to anything more than rhetorical flatulence, and they certainly do not qualify anyone for a Nobel Peace Prize (or anything else, for that matter). This tells us a great deal about the Nobel committee, which seems amusingly unaware of the fact that its high-flown rhetoric actually contradicts its own self-justifications and its founder’s instructions. But we should remember that this is also well in keeping with the career of the man it is honoring, whose qualifications to be president in the first place, lest we forget, were not much more impressive.

Admittedly, the Nobel committee has given us some good laughs before, especially recently, with its prizes awarded to ineffective bureaucrats like Kofi Annan and Mohamed El Baradei, egomaniacal ex-presidents like Jimmy Carter, pseudo-prophets of apocalypse like Al Gore, and terrorists like Yasser Arafat, who promptly stole the show with his legendary win-a-peace-prize-then-start-a-war routine. There is no doubt, however, that the committee has never before produced such a perfect masterpiece of absurdist comedy as the statement above. Indeed, the only thing that even remotely comes close to it is Chico Marx’s tribute to the indomitable power of hope, faith, and the human spirit to overcome all obstacles in A Night at the Opera:

So now I tell you how we fly to America. The first time we started we got-a half way there when we run out a gasoline and we gotta go back. Then I take-a twice as much gasoline. This time we’re just about to land, maybe three feet, when what do you think? We run out of gasoline again. And-a back-a we go again to get-a more gas. This time I take-a plenty gas. Well, we get-a half way over, when what do you think happens? We forgot-a the airplane. So, we gotta sit down and we talk it over. Then I get-a the great idea. We no take-a gasoline, we no take-a the airplane. We take steamship, and that friends, is how we fly across the ocean.

Obama himself couldn’t – and, in fact, hasn’t – put it any better. And there is a strong possibility that the real hilarity is yet to come. It now seems likely that once the Obama era is over and the decadent, half-senile establishment that created and sustained him has finally collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, we may well look back on the whole thing and, like the Chinese diplomat, laugh about how stupid it all was. Unfortunately, as any good comedian will tell you, comedy is always funniest because its true. The sight of a committee of diplomats reducing themselves to a blubbering gaggle of loons in the hopes of propping up a ludicrous mediocrity is momentarily hilarious, and the upcoming uninhibited goonery from Obama’s admirers threatens to outdo even this, but it is also somewhat sobering. When powerful people make fools of themselves, it behooves us to remember that when the fools are powerful, there is a strong chance that we are all in serious trouble. Obama and Obamamania are a joke that, in the end, is also on us.

Benjamin Kerstein is Senior Writer for The New Ledger.