President Obama opened up about his personal life in an interview with comedian Marc Maron, in which he called his father a “tragic figure,” and said his mother was sweet but also sarcastic.
“My dad was a tragic figure in a lot of ways,” Obama said in the interview that aired Monday morning. Obama said his father was a brilliant man who “took a leap” from a tiny village in the “backwaters of Kenya” to attend Harvard.
“And he never managed that leap as well as he could have,” Obama said, noting that he ended up becoming an alcoholic and abusive to several wives.
Obama said his view of his father came more from a composite picture drawn from others than one he assembled himself from direct exposure. His mother and grandmother, though, usually accentuated his father’s good qualities when he was growing up, so “a lot of his craziness I didn’t end up internalizing.”
Obama said his mother was a combination of “as sweet as she could be” with a “sarcastic sense of humor.”
“She was the last of the secular humanists…She thought all religions had something to say, she thought all cultures were fascinating,” he said. Obama said they only really went to church on Easter, and that he was exposed to a variety of Asian religions while in Hawaii and Islam while living with his father in Indonesia.
On his marriage, he said he and Michelle in some ways were an “opposites attract” situation at first because she was from this “Leave it to Beaver” family with a solid mother and father, and he had moved around a lot more and was more “adventurous” and open to new things.
One of their major points of contention, he said, was his tendency to run 15 minutes late to events and her frustration with that.
Obama said that several years into their relationship, Michelle described how her dad, because he had multiple sclerosis, had to wake up an hour earlier than everybody just to get dressed. He said if they wanted to go see Michelle’s brother play basketball, they had to get there early so that her dad could get a seat.
It was about “not wanting to stand out and miss something,” he said.
The lengthy interview gave Maron plenty of chances to ask about Obama’s life as president over the last six years. Maron asked how the president manages to compartmentalize certain parts of his life and continue to perform on the job, mentioning the time he had to tell jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on the same night as the Osama bin Laden raid.
The president said, just like with any performing art, it’s a craft and you learn over time “when it works and when it doesn’t.”
But he also said over years in office, you also gain a sense of confidence and lose fear.
“I was talking to somebody the other day, about why I actually think that I am a better president and would be a better candidate if I were running than I had been,” he said.
“It’s sort of like an athlete. You might slow down a little bit, you might not jump as high as you used to, but I know what I’m doing and I’m fearless.”
“Also part of that fearlessness is that you’ve screwed up enough times…I’ve been through the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls, and I emerged and I lived and that’s such a liberating feeling,” he concluded.
“That’s one of the benefits of age. It almost compensates the fact that I can’t play basketball anymore.”
Maron also asked who Obama likes as comedians, and Obama readily offered a varied list, including Richard Pryor, as an early one, as well as Dick Gregory, Jerry Seinfeld and Louis C.K., a close friend of Maron’s.
On Louis C.K., Obama said he is “wonderful in in a self-deprecating but edgy kind of way — [he’s] basically good-hearted when he’s saying stuff that is pretty wrong.”
