White House Correspondents’ Dinner resumes to celebrate journalists
Like so much else, what is nicknamed the “Nerd Prom” has faced its challenges lately, but it’s back this year.
After being canceled in 2020 and 2021 over coronavirus-related concerns, The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is scheduled to return Saturday, April 30. C-SPAN typically carries the event live from the Washington Hilton Hotel In Washington, D.C., while such news networks as CNN and MSNBC usually dip in and out of the dinner as the evening warrants.
Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah is the program’s featured entertainer, after starting the month as host of the postponed Grammy Awards on CBS. However, much attention is sure to go to remarks by President Joe Biden, should he be present (which hadn’t been confirmed at the time this article was written; his predecessor, Donald Trump, didn’t attend the dinner while in office).
The dinner dates back to the 1920s, but big-name performers factored in starting in the mid-1940s. Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Danny Thomas, Jimmy Durante and Danny Kaye were among the earliest to participate; more recently, comics on the order of Jay Leno, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’brien and recent Oscars co-host Wanda Sykes have been the norm.
When the dinner last was staged in 2019, the organizers went a different way with the “entertainment.” After comedian Michele Wolf generated a stir with some comments the year before, the showcase spot went to presidential biographer Ron Chernow – which some members of the White House Correspondents’ Association saw as keeping with the intention of the occasion (also involving the presentation of journalism scholarships), along with a major reduction in the number of celebrities invited as guests.
On that last count, though, one of the big attractions of television coverage of the dinner has been the red-carpet line that sees attendees encountering one another and being interviewed as they enter the site. C-SPAN especially has given extensive time to that in the past, so it’ll interesting to see whether that remains the case ... and also to hear, given the current times, just how humorous Noah and others get. Or not.