Obama draws laughs at press dinner

The glitchy rollout of the U.S. government’s new health-care website and a contentious relationship with Congress may have bedevilled him for the past year, but President Barack Obama milked them for comedic fodder at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington on Saturday night.

In the annual tradition of offering a send-up of the press, his rivals and often himself, Obama noted that Republicans have been as tough on House Speaker John Boehner as they had previously been on the president. “Which proves that orange really is the new black,” he said, to roars from the audience of 2,600 at the Washington Hilton. He was, of course, poking fun at Boehner’s preternatural tan, a frequent target of Washington punch lines.

The technical problems with the government’s health-care website provided the inspiration for one of the year’s most popular movies, Obama said. Then the poster for the animated film Frozen appeared on the large television screens.

Obama’s routine at the dinner focused mostly on those likely to be vying for the 2016 presidential nominations. Fox News will miss him when he leaves office, he said, because “it will be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya.”

Joel McHale, known for his pop culture satire as the former host of Talk Soup and his role on the sitcom Community, took a sharp-edged approach as comic headliner. Early in his routine, he praised Obama’s comedy stylings. “My favourite was when you said you’d close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay,” McHale said. “That was hilarious.” The Washington Post