TYB
>>10511517
>Does anyone know what they were laughing at?
>Always wondered.
Reagan telling jokes.
The first really "behind-the-scenes" picture I'd ever taken of President Ronald Reagan, it was taken about two months after he was inaugurated and he had an interview with Walter Cronkite. It was Cronkite's last interview with a sitting president as anchor of the Evening News and I was shooting the interview for CBS. And afterwards there was a party, sort of, that was given for Walter Cronkite in the President's study off...off the Oval Office and I went in and they were telling jokes apparently. And as I explained...I explained many times, when I'm photographing, I'm concentrating so hard that I don't hear and I don't know what the joke was. So, I have asked...I have asked every single man in that picture what the joke was and no one will tell me.
https://time.com/favorite-photograph-president/
Ronald Reagan loved humorous stories, using them as Abraham Lincoln did: to illustrate a serious point in an engaging way, or to deflect anger and disarm an antagonist, or sometimes simply for enjoyment. He had the State Department collect anti-Soviet jokes circulating among opposition groups and repeated them to Mikail Gorbachev, much to the Soviet leader’s annoyance. However, Gorbachev is said to have enjoyed the following one:
During a time when the Moscow police were cracking down on speeding, an emergency meeting was called at the Kremlin. Gorbachev, racing to his car, grabbed the keys from his driver. They roared by a speed trap and a policeman took after the car, but did not issue a ticket, later explaining to his partner that there was a very important person in the car. “Who?” his partner asked. “I don’t know, but he must have been important because Gorbachev was driving.”
This photograph was taken in the Oval Office on March 3, 1981—six weeks after Reagan was inaugurated—at the time of his interview by Walter Cronkite.
https://www.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2011.36