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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I thought it was funny, but wasn't sure what type of reply would be appropriate...

I'm annoyed -- they changed the link after I posted it, so that the best "smell the fart" pic isn't there any more. Here's one:

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funny. He does try so hard to be taken seriously. I don't know if anyone else has noticed also but when he doesn't have a prepared speech to read he stutters and stammers almost to the point of distraction.

He goes "um, ,um, um,uh, um , uh, ummmm...". sometimes over ten times or more before he is able to form a cogent response when he is unscripted.

Didn't you mean "Obama IS a fart"?

He's a lot like GW Bush, in that he's OK when he's reading someone else's material. In fact, he's much better than OK. But, like Bush, he doesn't speak well off the cuff. However, to be fair to Obama, it's just that he stumbles over his words as he thinks through what he's saying, which I understand, because it's something I do. When you get past the stammering, he's usually conveying a pretty thoughtful concept... often with a lot more complexity and nuance than you typically hear in political speeches. In a sense, that's a mark of his inexperience. I suspect that if he'd served in the Senate for 10 years before running, he'd have developed much better public speaking instincts, and a readier arsenal of set phrases and pat answers. No that those are good things... they just make a politician seem a lot smoother.