The State of the Union is carefully scripted, prepared and tweaked for months in advance to make sure the President uses the exact right words for every topic.
But tonight, President Obama couldn’t resist a quick off-book jab at the Republicans cheering on his exit from office.
“I have no more campaigns to run,” Obama says at one point, which prompted laughs and applause from the Republican lawmakers in the audience. Breaking into a sly smile, Obama then added, “I know because I won both of them.”
His unscripted joke elicited some of the loudest cheers of the evening and was the “most social moment” of the speech, according to statistics compiled by Facebook.
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Write to Tessa Berenson Rogers at tessa.Rogers@time.com