Comedian sets off furor at press dinner
WASHINGTON — The panna cotta had been served and the First Amendment duly celebrated by the time comedian Michelle Wolf took the stage Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
What followed was a roast that took unflinching aim at some of the notables in the room — and quickly opened a partisan divide, largely but not entirely along partisan lines, over the limits of comedy and comity under a president who rarely hesitates to attack the press.
Wolf described Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, as “an Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women” and took a shot at her “smokey eye” makeup, saying it was made from the ashes of “burnt facts.” She labeled Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor, an inveterate liar, and asked: “If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree?”
“I’m not suggesting she get hurt, just stuck,” Wolf added, puckishly, as an icy silence — and a few scattered chortles — fell over the blacktie crowd here. Conway sat expressionlessly. Sanders, granted a seat of honor on the dais, limited her reaction to an arched eyebrow and pursed lips.
It was an earthy performance by Correspondents’ dinner standards, if nothing out of place in an average comedy club. But feedback from the left and right quickly leapt to extremes.
“It was personally offensive,” Brian Kilmeade, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” said in the ballroom, minutes after Wolf ended her set.
“To me, that was an attack to impress Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert,” Kilmeade added. “Congratulations, when the three of you go out to dinner, I’m sure you’ll be laughing a lot. But in terms of the people here and the people at home — totally offensive, horrible choice. In fact, it’s the reason why the president didn’t want to go.”
Critics of President Donald Trump — no stranger to lobbing insult-comic punch lines at opponents and the first president to skip the gala since Jimmy Carter — wondered what the fuss was about. “Before we criticize Michelle Wolf, let’s remember that Donald Trump has done and said some of the crudest things that any president in history has ever done,” said Howard Fineman, a left-leaning analyst for NBC News. “Just have a little perspective.”
By Sunday morning, Wolf, a contributor to “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” whose Netflix talk show starts in May, had seemingly scandalized Washington’s intersecting political and media tribes. Trump weighed in on Twitter, writing, “Everyone is talking about the fact that the White House Correspondents Dinner was a very big, boring bust.”