Putting s on the
President’s Face

BY SHIRLEY WU

In 2009, President Obama became the first sitting president to appear on a late-night talk show. First Lady Michelle Obama followed suit in 2012, appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. They've been on many more talk shows since, promoting HealthCare.gov and urging America to get moving. From this plethora of comedic gold arose a great opportunity: to put emojis on the POTUS and FLOTUS's face.

You may be wondering, "why do something so ridiculously silly"? Simple: it's been a long and exhausting election season, and we'll all need a pick-me-up come Election Day.

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
TheEllenShow

Start

Since his first time on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the President has made 24 late-night appearances on 11 shows with 10 different hosts. Impressively, the First Lady has very similar numbers despite a three-year late start: 22 appearances across 12 shows, also with 10 hosts.

They seem to favor hosts David Letterman and Stephen Colbert over the years, appearing four times each on both shows. Over the past half year however, the POTUS and FLOTUS have both appeared on newer shows hosted by Seth Meyers, James Corden and Samantha Bee.

(Hover over the images for more detail on the host or appearance.)

The FLOTUS has made many appearances since 2012 for Let's Move!, Reach Higher, and Let Girls Learn to promote healthy living and girls' education around the world.

The POTUS's appearances, on the other hand, peaked in 2012 (presumably for the election) and again in the last year to reflect on his presidency and promote Hillary Clinton's run for presidency.

(Hover over the hosts to see the corresponding guest appearances.)

Out of the POTUS and FLOTUS's 46 appearances on late-night, 50 video clips have made it on to the hosts' official Youtube channels. The earliest uploaded video was the Evolution of Mom Dancing (FLOTUS) on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2013, and the most viewed were Mean Tweets (POTUS) on Jimmy Kimmel Live with 46M views and Carpool Karaoke (FLOTUS) with 45M views on the Late Late Show with James Corden.

(Click any circle to watch the video on Youtube. If nothing else, watch Carpool Karaoke because FLOTUS is the coolest.)

Here's the fun part: out of the 50 videos, 29 of them had captions. So I took the liberty of taking a screenshot of the video every time someone talked, and fed the images into Google's fancy facial recognition software.

The result is that videos with the First Lady have significantly more smiles than those with the President. Out of 15 videos, those with FLOTUS had 339 expressions of joy, with as many as 75 in a video. Those with POTUS, on the other hand, only had 211 across 14 videos, with a high of 36. That's an average of 22.6 smiles per video for the First Lady, and 15.07 for the President; in other words, FLOTUS had 49.97% more smiles than POTUS.

(The smaller dots are every time someone smiled in a video. Hover for more details.)

And finally, the pick-me-up: below are circles representing the 29 videos, each with a screenshot for every time someone talked. Select a video to see the images, and hover over the timeline to read the corresponding captions. Click on the timeline to see 's on the President's face. Then, click on the image to jump to that moment of the video.

No matter what happens on Tuesday,
I hope this put a on your face.

If it did, consider sharing the 💖

Made with 💕 by Shirley Wu for Datasketch|es.
Thank you for eight years, Mr. and Mrs. Obama ✨