Obama and Wilmore Reserved Their Sharpest Jokes For Media Targets
In the terminology comedians use, President Obama “killed” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. His final comic address to the nation’s press corps (and cable-news audiences who had tuned in to CNN or MSNBC or C-SPAN to watch) was a notably small-d democratic proposition filled with well-crafted punchlines. The President made fun of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders with as much vigor and sharpness as he did Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. (John Kasich, he noted, was “polling too low to rate a joke.”) Obama and his writers rolled out a lot of good jokes plus a much less funny taped piece that paired the President with John Boehner, joking about retirement. (Boehner was actually funnier earlier in the week, with his now-famous remark about Cruz being “Lucifer in the flesh.”)
The President was followed by Larry Wilmore, host of Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show, whose monologue was more uneven but sometimes — as you’d expect from a professional comic — cut deeper than Obama’s. Wilmore’s set of jokes contained more than a fair share of groaners, such as a bunch of Obama-looks-so-old lines (“Your hair is so white it tried to punch me at a Trump rally,” etc.) At one point, he even had to acknowledge that he wasn’t “killing” by saying, “Groans are good,” but you knew he really didn’t mean that.
Much of the cable-news media are going to seize on two things, both of them the two men’s exit lines: the President’s “Obama out!” and mic-drop (which I thought was corny for such a corn-avoiding speaker), and Wilmore’s pretty-much-sincere, breast-beating, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my [variation on the n-word].” Deploying that word is always loaded-ammo for the media, which gets all faint-hearted and feigns shock — you’ll hear the fake outrage today and in the days to come.
I thought the most interesting theme that ran through the night was that, at a site where in years past any President and any guest comic spends a chunk of time ridiculing a wide array of media targets, this Saturday’s event ignored Fox News in favor of numerous, truly withering remarks about CNN. To quote just two among many: Obama said that Jake Tapper had “left journalism to join CNN,” and Wilmore referred to Don Lemon as an “alleged journalist.” To which, it can be noted, Lemon gave Wilmore the middle finger.
Related: Photos: The 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, red carpet and parties
It suggests just how much both the White House and adversarial media such as Wilmore’s political-satire cadre have come to recognize the ratings-grabbing cynicism of cable TV in general and the Jeff Zucker-led version of CNN. The one moment that seemed less jokey than downright scolding was when Obama, in the midst of talking about TV coverage of the current Presidential campaign, said simply, “I hope y’all are proud of yourselves” — meaning, of course, that you should not be proud of yourselves. That one carried a real sting.
