Will Jimmy Carter have to stop telling this joke now?

By Jill Vejnoska

March 7, 2016

When Jimmy Carter said Sunday that he no longer needed to get treatment for cancer, it was good news on every front.

Still … The former president might have to give up one of his guaranteed laugh lines as a result.

Ever since Carter told the world he had cancer, he's been admirably transparent about his condition and treatment — including his supposed tongue-tiedness when it comes to the name of the cutting edge immunotherapy drug he began taking last August.

It’s called “pembrolizumab.” Or, as Carter put it at his annual Town Hall meeting with Emory freshman last fall:

"It's called 'pembro-laza…lizu-mab … I've almost learned how to say it," Carter grinned broadly as many of the 1,300 students packing the bleachers at the Woodruff P.E. Center laughed and cheered him on.

Weeks later, his pronunciation was getting better — and so were his punchlines.

“I’m taking immunotherapy,” Carter said at the start of his Sunday school class the weekend of the annual Plains Peanut Festival. “It’s a medicine called ‘pembro-loozemab’ … I’m sure all of you will remember that.”

The chuckles that had begun rolling across the crowd of more than 300 people inside little Maranatha Baptist Church grew as Carter went in for the big finish:

“It took me two weeks to learn how to say it!”

This latest announcement, which also occurred at Sunday school, means an end to Carter’s every-three-weeks regimen of pembrolizumab for now (a Carter Center spokeswoman said later the 91-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner would continue to receive scans and resume treatment “if necessary”); but does it also mean an end to his guaranteed crowd-pleasing line? And if so, what might possibly replace it?

(Surely not another “endorsement” of Donald Trump?!)

How about this, relayed to us by Mandy Flynn, Carter’s niece who was in this past Sunday’s class:

“He sort of joked, ‘Now I may forget how to pronounce it.’”

About the Author

Jill Vejnoska