Are we presidentiable yet?

US President Barack Obama recently concluded his Philippines visit, and while some Filipinos were simply awed by his presidential demeanor, others were waiting for a superhero’s promise to protect the country from land-grabbing neighbors. Guess which one seems unrealistic?

Politics is a delicate balance, and two TV shows that portray this better than most are HBO’s Veep (now in season 3) and Netflix’s House of Cards (now in its second season).

Political humor is a hit-or-miss affair. It either plays to too small or segmented an audience, or it’s too broad, or it just isn’t funny. And then there’s the fact that political reality is often way funnier than the people making jokes about it. (Cue highlight reel of Philippine Congress in action, or US Congress in inaction.)

Shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report understand this, so they center their jabs on real-life news reports. HBO’s Veep stakes out that more difficult terrain — satire — and manages to wring wicked laughs out of the travails of a vapid though resilient US vice president, Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Meyer is a composite political creature, a little bit Sarah Palin, and a little bit fluffheaded liberal. (The show never reveals her political party, or the name of her immediate boss, who is merely referred to as POTUS — standard acronym parlance for President of the United States.) In seasons one and two, she mulls the prospect of running alongside POTUS in the next election, while fending off political dirty bombs left and right, surrounded by the most incompetent, self-serving staff in political satire history.

You’ve got Meyer’s chief of staff Amy (Anna Chlumsky, a long way from her childhood role alongside Macauley Culkin in My Girl); Mike (Matt Walsh), a burnt-out press spokesperson; Gary (Tony Hale, a.k.a. Buster from Arrested Development) as Meyers’ right-hand man who knows a bit too much about lipstick; Sue (Sufe Bradshaw), the crisp and sharp-tongued VP assistant; Jonah (Timothy Simons), a West Wing liaison who’s into death metal and political blogging; and Dan (Reid Scott), a D.C. hustler who can’t stay on a political boat long enough to decide if it’s sinking or not.

The repartee is fast and furious, but not full of impenetrable jargon and speeches like Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing; this is mostly rapid-fire insult, and each half hour of Veep crafts some of the best insult comedy we’ve heard in years. It’s possibly the most sarcastic TV series ever.

Multi-Emmy winner Louis-Dreyfus plays Selina as opportunistic yet oddly charming, guided towards catastrophe by a staff that is ready to jump ship at the first sign of a sno-cone. Louis-Dreyfus earns it here: nobody does a pained reaction take or an ironic line reading like her (watch her fake admiration of a gift at a book signing: “This is an absolutely stunning… butter sculpture…”) Think Seinfeld’s Elaine Bennis with a poli-sci degree and a hell of a lot more ambition.

Admittedly, American political humor is a tough sell to Filipinos. The writing on the show is as thick as a Ukranian accent; you have to rewind to get all the digs. Here’s a sampling from the season 3 premiere:

• Selina (on a sad-sack political colleague): “How did that bag of wrist slits get the nomination?”

• Senior strategist Kent Davison “Someone get me actual intel. I feel like I’m Joe Public, I know nothing, and I don’t like it.”

• Wise-but-weary White House chief of staff Ben Cafferty: “That’s politics in a nutsack.”

• Dan (to Amy): “Texting behind your back? What are you, Hendrix-texting?”

• Jonah (working an iPad): “And… upload the money shot.”

Sue: “I hate that you learned English from pornography.”

The show has a bit of a history. Armando Iannucci wanted to adapt his BBC political comedy series, The Thick of It, for American television; it led to a failed ABC TV pilot and a film, In the Loop, also starring Chlumsky.

Eventually, HBO offered a no-holds-barred series with abundant room for verbal abuse and a semi-documentary feel (similar to Arrested Development or UK’s The Office).

If there’s a recurring pattern in Veep, it’s that every bad turn deserves another. The politicos engage in a nonstop round of hot potato, trying to toss the grenade to the next guy before it blows up. Even when VP Meyer’s staff actually does something that gives her political mileage, it inevitably goes kablooie; it’s up to Meyer, then, with more political instinct than most, to say or do something to pull up her ratings. Usually by accident.

Developed by political gadflies Iannucci, Christopher Godsick and Frank Rich, Veep has an air of insider authenticity: you can well believe that, behind the scenes, this is the way D.C. insiders talk, manipulate, horse-trade and crap all over one another. Except in real life, they don’t do it for laughs, they’re actually running the government.

House of Cards, produced by David Fincher for Netflix, follows the trail of revenge forged by House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) after he’s passed over as Secretary of State nominee by the incoming administration. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Frank is accompanied by his icy wife Claire (Robin Wright), an operator from the Lady Macbeth School of politics to match Spacey’s ambitious but conflicted kingmaker. Will you need a copy of the U.S. Constitution close by to enjoy House of Cards? Maybe. But think of it as Game of Thrones in the Oval Office, and you’re halfway there. Spacey sinks his teeth into his Southern drawl, leaning into the camera frequently to offer viewers political asides — a device that breaks the fourth wall, but makes us somehow complicit in his increasingly nasty political machinations. From leaking documents to sleazy reporters to proffering razor blades to suicidal colleagues, Frank is the kind of political animal we usually only encounter in Southern Gothic fiction, not primetime television. Also based on a British TV series, House of Cards goes for gravitas, sometimes spilling over the top, but in its overall arc, it just may succeed.