OK, this is crass and trivial, but I just noticed that Obama's "serious listening" face looks a lot like Joey Tribianni's "smell the fart" face. One of the jokes in the old "Friends" series was that Joey, a soap opera actor, would make a face as if he'd just smelled a fart, in order to look serious and thoughtful. He called it "smell-the-fart acting." Obama seems to have attended the same acting school.

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Apparently, I'm not the first to make the connection:

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