This Saturday only a half-mile from Blue Heron Farm at the Grange Hall, comedian Scott Blakeman will be doling out policy advice for the President.

“Every good cause raises money through telethons: muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis,” he said. “Why can’t the government shell out that 70, 80 million dollars? I think the defense industry should have to do telethons. I’d love to see them get up there and go, ‘We have a bunch of countries we’d love to attack, but we can’t unless these phones are ringing.’ ”

He trades in what he calls liberal Jewish humor. Despite his progressive persuasion Mr. Blakeman is a regular contributor to The Strategy Room, a live webcast on FoxNews.com. He says he has made peace with his colleagues and learned to have fun with the role of dissident on the show, even if the show’s listeners don’t appreciate his political insights.

“All the e-mails are negative,” he said. “It’s just uniformly ‘He’s an idiot.’”

For years Mr. Blakeman has taught a standup comedy workshop at the New School in New York City and has counted among his pupils a young Jon Stewart.

“I take complete credit for him,” he laughed, in an interview with the Gazette.

Like Mr. Stewart, the self-identified “news junkie” Mr. Blakeman scours the daily headlines for his latest material. An avowed supporter of the President, he denies that Obama has lost the luster of his heady inauguration days.

“Obama’s approval rating is 44 per cent, which isn’t that bad,” he said. “People forget that Bush’s approval rating when he left office was 28 . . . not 28 per cent just 28.”

Despite working in an age of toxic political discourse, Mr. Blakeman said he strives to be received warmly by Republicans and liberals alike.

“I don’t try to antagonize people,” he said. “Everybody’s different, I just want them to relax and enjoy themselves even if they have a slightly different point of view. I don’t know better than people, I just want everyone to be able to be laugh at themselves.”

He says that after his political career Mr. Obama may have a future in comedy as evinced by his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, an event that Mr. Blakeman covered for MSNBC as a commentator.

“[Mr. Obama] has a great comedic style,” he said. “I know he had help with writers but he really has a comedian’s timing. As a comedian who has written for politicians I know that you could write the best jokes in the world but they can botch it up if they don’t know how to deliver them.”

Mr. Blakeman also says that liberals need to be able to laugh at themselves. For his part Mr. Blakeman is self-deprecating about his own fruitless practice of signing online petitions all day for various progressive causes.

“I did get an e-mail from the President once though,” he said. “It said, Dear Scott, Please donate.’ I think I was the only one who got it.”

Conservative comedy, he argues, is a slightly more difficult landscape to navigate.

“There are some witty conservative writers, but comedy tends to be a rebellious exercise,” he said. “It’s tough to be a comedian and say ‘I have a very nice house and I agree with the status quo.’”

Mr. Blakeman’s ability for bipartisan diplomacy is perhaps best illustrated by a project he began seven years ago with Palestinian-American comedian Dean Obeidallah. Together they have toured college campuses in a show called Standup for Peace: The Two-Comedian Solution to Middle East Peace, in an attempt to diffuse some of the hostility surrounding the issue.

For Mr. Blakeman the best antidote for cultural tensions is laughter. He says that much of the tension in the Middle East derives from a simple case of misunderstanding, something comedy can help to alleviate.

“When people don’t know people from outside of their groups they just form all these ridiculous opinions of each other.”

Mr. Blakeman said that there are marked similarities between the Jewish and Arab sense of humor even if Arab standup is a relative newcomer to the comedy circuit.

“We bring people together and they laugh,” he said. “It comes down to getting to know people. We’re the same when we’re laughing together.”