Remember me
I think it’s fair to say that everybody’s experienced a situation where they said, did or wore the wrong thing, which may have caused embarrassment or even backlash. For most of us, the moment passes and merely lives on in those quiet, anxious moments of our psyche. For others — former presidents, for example — the moment is forever. Seth Meyers brought up Barack Obama’s tan suit debacle last week, and days later it was mentioned a second time by Larry David, despite the fact that it’s been 12 years.
Flash back to 2014, and you might remember then-President Barack Obama causing quite a bit of controversy when he wore a tan suit to a press conference about terrorism. It was deemed too casual by many for the topic at hand. The first time the issue came up as part of the 2026 TV schedule was on Late Night with Seth Meyers on August 5, as the host spoke about recent reports of President Donald Trump making money off of his cryptocurrency. Meyers said:
Can you imagine if any other president made over $1 billion off their own cryptocurrency while they were in office? Obama wore a tan suit once, and Republicans lost their [bleep] minds.
Barack Obama wasn’t the only one catching strays, however. Seth Meyers, who often talks politics on his late-night NBC talk show, also fired shots at Madame Web when he compared Trump’s approval ratings to the MCU flop’s Rotten Tomatoes score. Ouch on all accounts!
OK, so the tan suit fiasco coming up once 12 years later isn’t that wild, especially in the context of Seth Meyers using it to give perspective on current political issues. However, now it’s come up again.
On the season finale of Larry David’s Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness — which aired Friday, August 7, on HBO — Barack Obama was featured in a sketch with David. The Seinfeld creator played one of the president’s aides, and the scene gave an amusing (and obviously fictional) account of the events that might have led to Obama choosing the tan suit for that 2014 press conference. You can see the sketch in full below:
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I’m sure in actuality there was no Mango Tango smoothie accident that led to Barack Obama’s navy suit jacket being ruined, requiring the aide to convince the president that tan was the way to go. But it’s funny that Obama is apparently cool with Larry David joking about it. (Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions.)
More than that, though, it’s just plain weird for the tan suit controversy to get brought up twice in one week — more than a decade after the original mishap. Both times it was in the name of comedy, too, though the context was wildly different.
All eight episodes of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness are available to stream now with an HBO Max subscription, and you can catch Late Night with Seth Meyers at 12:35 a.m. weeknights on NBC.