Barack Obama on Jimmy Kimmel Live: 'In Kenya we drive on the other side'

‘Kenyan-born Muslim socialist president’ holds his own against comedy host but
strikes serious note about ‘criminals’ who shot police in Ferguson

Tom McCarthy
Friday 13 March 2015 06.53 GMT

President Barack Obama made an appearance on the late-night comedy show Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday, gamely subjecting himself to jokes about getting high, going gray and hailing from Kenya.

It was a long interview – the better part of 40 minutes, with three commercial breaks – and the president delivered the goods, rapping about Area 51, Hillary Clinton’s email, dentistry, midnight snacking in the White House, Kanye West and the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which stars, of course, the guest who followed Obama, Penn.

“That’s a classic,” Obama told Kimmel, of the stoner-sex-classroom comedy set in San Diego. “I lived it man, I didn’t just see it.” This was literally true, in the sense that both the film and the president’s biography feature hot-boxing, the practice of getting high by filling a vehicle you are in with marijuana smoke.

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The appearance was not all yuks. Obama spoke for about four minutes, an eternity in TV time, about the shooting on Wednesday night of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri. The officers were treated at a hospital and released.

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