With Head of State (2003), Chris Rock played with the fish-out-of-water theme, with his black president, an alderman/community organizer who finds himself thrust into the race almost by accident, chosen to run against a war hero after a feminist woman candidate decides that she’d rather run in four years when she has a better chance.

Sound familiar? “When you look back at it, the similarities of the [Obama] campaign, it’s striking,” says Ali LeRoi, who co-wrote Head of State with Rock. (Rock also directed.) “At the time, we didn’t think it was going to happen any time soon. That in five years—five years!—a black guy not only would be running, but would win.”

Other comics, like Eddie Murphy in 1983, used the assassination theme as a running gag, tapping into the black fear that a black president wouldn’t last past the first day, sure to be felled by some neo-Nazi zealot: Jesse Jackson, he quipped, wasn’t just running for president, he was running to keep in shape—the better to dodge those bullets.

Dave Chappelle picked up on the meme in his stand-up routines, cracking, “I’d be the first black president… I don’t think anyone will hurt me… Because my vice president will be Mexican. For a little insurance.”

But at least one black comic used the black president shtick to make a political point. In ’77, Richard Pryor played with the concept on his short-lived skit series, The Richard Pryor Show.

He’s the first black president, at a press conference, somberly answering the reporter’s questions in political speak: “The neutron bomb is a whole-cost weapon. It’s not within the cellular realm of reality. It’s a neo-pacificist weapon.”

But once the black reporters start asking questions, the rage beneath the sober façade starts to peep through, and the president’s agenda becomes evident. Huey Newton will run the FBI, he declares: “He knows the ins and outs of [it].” When a white reporter says something provocative about his mama, well, let’s just say that even the first black president has his limits.

Stinging satire, of course, is uncomfortable—even when (especially when) it’s of the Pryor variety, or that of Chappelle’s Black Bush.