To some, Joe Biden is funny.  What makes him funny is that he usually isn’t trying to be funny, but he makes so many verbal mistakes.  Some even call him the “human gaffe machine”.  In this video clip, he was giving a speech and the teleprompter blew over, so he made a joke at the expense of himself and Obama.

It’s good to be able to laugh at yourself, but isn’t it kinda sad that there’s such a reliance on teleprompters that Obama and Biden are known for extreme stuttering and making ridiculous unintended statements when they don’t have them?  I mean, this is the President and Vice-President of the United States, some of the most powerful and influential people in the world!  I know it’s more difficult to speak “off the cuff”, but they should know what they’re doing!

Oh, wait, I got kinda serious there.  This is the wrong blog for that.  My bad…  Let’s go in a different direction.

If you happen to see a question-and-answer session or an interview with Obama where he doesn’t have a teleprompter, you could count how many times he says “Uhh” per minute.  I used to do that with one of my foreign teachers in college who could barely speak English.  (He averaged about 15 times per minute, which is once every four seconds.  Imagine listening to that the whole class!)  Counting this with Obama won’t cause you to miss much — he usually doesn’t answer the question anyway.  Of course he’ll give an answer, but often he “speaks around” the answer, making “politically correct” statements but not actually answering the question or leaving out the specifics.