COMEDY … and … GAZA. Two words that probably don’t sit together too well. But they did come together in this week’s news.

Israel’s military onslaught against the Hamas movement in Gaza, in response to last October’s deadly incursion into southern Israel, and the capturing of hostages, was again the subject of  many swirling media questions.   One was about the IDF, Israel’s so-called Defense force, though at times Offense seems more accurate. Would this force launch its much-threatened attack on the evermore densely-populated area around Rafah in Gaza’s far south?

Then, could any evacuation process for the 1.4 million civilians in their makeshift shelters conceivably be put in place ahead of such an attack? … And also, how much heed will Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really pay, if any, to President Joe Biden’s insistence there should be such protection and a safe escape route for civilians?

But perhaps the most immediate question of all was … would the negotiations in Paris succeed in achieving a cease-fire, one that might allow hostages to be released, as well as some relief for Gazans – those negotiations being mediated by the US, Egypt, and the emirate of Qatar.  Well one answer (we can’t yet know how complete it was, exactly) came from the President of the United States. And Joe Biden delivered it in the unexpected venue of the comedian Seth Meyers’ late-night talk show on NBC. He said he hoped that “by next Monday, we’ll have a ceasefire.”

His surprise talk-show appearance was in contrast with his relatively few formal, set-piece interviews with journalists. The Associated Press got sniffy about all this, saying Biden has “largely avoided White House press conferences and on-the-record sit-downs with text reporters”.

“Text” reporters? Surely all reporters employ text in some way, don’t they? (And so do comedians for that matter.) I suspect the AP was thinking primarily about agency reporters like AP’s own team, plus probably our country’s better-known newspapers – once upon a time called our “leading” newspapers.

The agency pointed out, too, that Biden had also avoided what it called the “traditional” pre-Super Bowl presidential interview. I don’t know that the President answering questions as part of the pre-game razzamatazz is exactly a tradition. President Barack Obama did make it a “thing,” repeating it from 2009 onward (and doing it “live” too … but then he was Obama, a complete natural-born broadcaster). Trump pointedly skipped it in 2018. And last month’s big game was in fact the second time Biden skipped it. (A year ago, Fox was doing the match coverage and there’s been little else but lasting enmity between the Biden White House and that network.)

Now, we know Biden generally disdains what he calls “malarkey,” possibly his favorite word of dismissal, but nonetheless, this week he wholeheartedly opted for the softball setting of the comedian’s sofa.  Well, to be accurate, it was another comedic actor, Amy Poehler who sat on the sofa — Biden got the easy chair, next to the host’s desk. But he also went with his host on what Fox News called “an ice-cream outing” to a New York ice-cream store, and that was where his cautiously optimistic ceasefire prediction was voiced – to reporters who were tossing questions to him standing by the counter, holding a slowly-melting, mint-flavored cone. I can’t help reporting it was a sugar cone.

But it was from the easy chair in the studio, that Biden got to carry out the domestic political work of this TV appearance. He poked at his very likely opponent in November, trying to highlight Donald Trump’s apparent memory-lapses rather than his own, as well as (more substantially, perhaps) calling his opponent’s ideas antiquated and retrograde, compared with his own forward-looking policies.

But there’s never a single front being fought in any Presidential media opportunity, and you don’t have to be a harshly cynical correspondent to have noticed that Biden’s ceasefire talk came on the very eve of Michigan’s presidential primary. And it came only a few days after the Arab American Mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, Abdullah Hammoud, published an op-ed in the “leading” newspaper, the New York Times, saying that his city’s constituents are “haunted by the images, videos and stories streaming out of Gaza.” He also pointed out that this constituency has previously helped to create a dependable voting bloc for the Democratic Party. But now, Biden’s support for Israel has prompted “a visceral sense of betrayal” because, the Mayor said, the President

“… calls for our votes once more, while at the same time selling the very bombs that Netanyahu’s military is dropping on our families and friends.”

After Biden’s “Late Night” show, and Michigan’s results, where Biden’s support was dented appreciably by Democrats opting for “Uncommitted” on their ballot-paper, we can safely say this. A lot is riding on halting the Gaza war – not only on the bloody battleground itself, but also in voting booths six thousand miles away.