In a new interview, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke about her willingness to do away with the office’s more straight-laced traditions in order to reach more Americans. “What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way,” Obama told Variety. “My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen. So I’m always game for a good joke, and I’m not so formal in this role. There’s very little that we can’t do that people wouldn’t appreciate.”
Obama said that in order to launch initiatives like her Let’s Move program, she knew it would take “reaching people where they lived on a day-to-day basis, and the next step was, ‘How do you do that? Where are the people?’ Well, they’re not reading the op-ed pieces in the major newspapers. They’re not watching Sunday morning news talk shows. They’re doing what most people are doing: They are watching TV.”
“A lot of our audiences are kids and teens, and they want to be in on the joke,” she said. “And they’ll listen again. We’re just a little looser with this stuff than most traditional first ladies.”
Just as importantly, Obama — the first black first lady — spoke about the importance of diverse representation in film and television. “For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them,” she said. “And when I come across many little black girls who come up to me over the course of this seven and a half years with tears in their eyes, and they say, ‘Thank you for being a role model for me. I don’t see educated black women on TV, and the fact that you’re first lady validates who I am.'”
“I view myself as being the average woman,” Obama said. “While I am first lady, I wasn’t first lady my whole life. I’m a product of pop culture. I’m a consumer of pop culture, and I know what resonates with people. I know what they’ll get a chuckle out of and what they think is kind of silly. And whenever my team approaches me with ideas and concepts, we’re usually like, ‘Is this really funny? Are people going to understand it?'”
(Via Variety)