Michelle Wolf Is Ready to Roast Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Michelle Wolf is suddenly both singular and ubiquitous. The comedian doesn’t look (the Howard Stern–meets–Connie Britton hair), sound (the “apologizing for someone else bumping into her and spilling her drink at a loud bar” voice), or joke (her decidedly not-nice HBO special Nice Lady) like anyone else in comedy. Which is probably why she’s suddenly everywhere: hosting the Trump-less White House Correspondents’ dinner tomorrow and preparing for her new variety show, The Break, which premieres May 27 on Netflix. It feels like the only two things Wolf has left on her to-do list before world domination are this interview with GQ and getting her pants off.
Michelle Wolf: Sorry for the delay. I was trying on leather pants and got stuck.
GQ: I saw you at a Pure Barre session in the West Village one time. If you’ve made it into leather pants, the lifting, toning, and burning is clearly working for you.
I love a barre class. I can’t get enough of ’em.
In the next two months, you’re hosting the White House Correspondents’ dinner and premiering The Break.
Uh-huh.
Am I making you tense? Should I change the subject?
I mean, it’s all really great. I’m just hoping to not squander any opportunity—I feel like some of these things only come along once.
It’s an interesting time to host the Correspondents’ dinner. Obviously, Trump’s not going to be there, but do you think about him hearing your jokes? Or are you just worried about the people who are in the room?
I’m not so much worried about any of the people—including Trump—that I’m telling jokes about. I’m more worried that the jokes go over well. And I’m not even talking about in the room; I’m talking about when people watch it on TV and are like, “Oh, that’s funny.”
How weird that you’re delivering the jokes to the people the jokes are about, not the intended audience.
Oh, yeah. I’m expecting it to not play well in the room.
How do you prepare yourself to tell jokes that are gonna sound like they’re bombing, but that maybe means they’re working?
Be lucky enough that you’ve done plenty of corporate events where you know how that feels.
I feel like right now audiences in general are just so much more sensitive. Roy Wood Jr. said, “I have to decide how much of an argument I want to get into with the audience.” So when do you employ self-protection and when do you just go, “Fuck it! This is the joke I want to make!”
Any time I’m telling a joke that I could potentially get in trouble for, I try to cover the argument that I think they’d make. Like with my Hillary joke from my HBO special, Nice Lady, where I call her a bitch. Then I say, “That’s good!” [The joke: “I do have a theory on why Hillary lost—I think it’s ’cause no one likes her. You shouldn’t like Hillary. She’s a bitch. You have to be a bitch to be that powerful. We’re never going to have a nice lady run for president. Nice ladies aren’t in charge of things, and if you’re in charge of something and you think you’re a nice lady, no one else does.”] I try to present things in a way where they’re like, “I hadn’t thought about it that way. And the one thing I was gonna get mad about, you justified.” But then I see that they get mad at stuff that it’s unbelievable that they’d get mad at. And you’re like, “Yeah. No. You’re just not for my comedy.”
What have people gotten mad at you for?
I have a joke in my special: “There are very good dads out there, but a great dad is still just an okay mom. A fork is a shitty spoon.” And I’ve had a couple people tweet at me like, “How dare you’d say that? Dads work really hard.” And I’m just like, “If you know you’re a good dad, then it shouldn’t bother you. You should know that I’m not referencing you. You have some underlying issues with like being a father, and I can’t address your personal grievance.”
Every joke is going to offend somebody, right?
It’s just about people not throwing all of their own personal bullshit into your point of view. ’Cause they have to remember: I’m not coming at it from where they’re coming from. I’m coming at it from where I’m coming from. I can try to take into account things I think society will comment on, but I can’t take into account everyone else’s point of view.
I saw Louis C.K. on the tour where you opened for him. Does it feel to you like the moral ground is shifting, and that it can impact who gets to be a part of the world?
I don’t necessarily think it’s shifting in so much a genuine way—more in a trending sort of way. Look at someone like Louis, who got in trouble. But then you look at plenty of people five and ten years before him [who got away with harassment]. I hope this isn’t true, but knowing the way society works, five or ten years after Louis, they could get away with stuff again because it’s not of that moment. Because we all know that money is what makes things start or stop. There can be a movement full of emotion and those are always great, but they only ever really succeed if they’re also paired with a financial consequence. I just think this is a moment in time. We’ll see if people are held accountable the same way in the future.
It almost seems like people are getting grandfathered in. I was thinking about whether Letterman’s new show would have happened if the blackmail about him sleeping with employees had come out this year instead of nine years ago. Because we still know it happened.
Yeah, it was a similar thing with football. You remember like two or three seasons ago, a bunch of football players were getting in trouble in the off-season for abusing their girlfriends, or wives, or children? And for a brief moment, it was a really big deal. But five years or ten years before that, there were quarterbacks that were accused of rape and nothing happened. And I’m sure this past season similar things have happened, but it wasn’t really “trending” this season. Kneeling was trending this season.
“Caring whether a man is abusive is so 2015.”
It’s terrible to talk about it in those terms, but that’s kind of how we have started to live as a society.
Do you have any kind of responsibility to tackle social and political issues in your comedy?
My only responsibility as a comedian is to make people laugh. I think it’s irresponsible of a comedian to get onstage and knowingly say things that are making a point but not making a joke. I am totally fine with people that make a point and a joke, but if you do not have a joke in there, I do not know why you’re saying it onstage. I really think it does a disservice to comedy in general, because people will start to think of it like, “Oh, this is a place where I’ll hear the things I want to hear,” which isn’t what comedy should be. Comedy should be the place where you hear the things you didn’t know you wanted to hear. That’s why I don’t like to tell Trump jokes, because it’s really hard to tell a surprising Trump joke. You say, “Trump is bad,” and people go, “Woo!”
Is there anything that you want to talk about in your comedy that you haven’t found a way to make funny yet?
There’s a lot of stuff from my life. I worked on Wall Street while it was collapsing. I was a kinesiology major, so I’ve dissected a human—in school, not for, like, fun. But just like stuff like that that I haven’t found a way to talk about yet. But I feel like I’ll be able to talk more about myself and things that have happened in my life once the audience knows me more and can be like, “We trust her as a comedian, so we’ll go on a little bit of a journey with her.”
