Before Wednesday night’s bombshell that President Donald Trump reimbursed his personal lawyer for a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, comedian Michelle Wolf was the champion of the week’s news cycle.
Her monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night divided the country into two camps (as most things seem to do these days): those who thought she was funny and sharp, and those who thought she was crude and mean. The line of division wasn’t entirely predictable. Sure, a lot of liberals cheered and a lot of conservatives were offended, but a bunch of members of the White House press corps, such as Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker of the New York Times and Jeff Zeleny of CNN, made more than a few non-Beltway journalists cringe by joining the chorus of condemnation. There’s a price to be paid for White House access, and it’s never pretty to watch the transaction.
Wolf’s performance has already been pretty well twisted and blown out of proportion by her critics, including those who seem to have skipped the part where they actually listen to the monologue, so we thought we would run down the list of Wolf’s wide-ranging targets, joke by joke: Trump, the venue, Congress, Roy Moore, herself, Reince Priebus, protesters, herself, liberal media, Jake Tapper, Hillary Clinton, Trump, men, Trump, Donald Trump Jr.’s hair, Southwest Airlines, Trump, white nationalists, Harvey Weinstein, education funding, Mike Pence, abortion, herself, Bear Stearns, Al Franken, liberals, Ted Kennedy, Cabinet turnover, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Democrats, Kellyanne Conway, Wolf’s own body, Scott Pruitt, Ivanka Trump, Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Pence, Ann Coulter, CNN, Fox News, Sean Hannity, MSNBC, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, Rachel Maddow, Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, print media, cable news in general, the White House press corps, Trump, Eric Trump, all journalists, immigration policies and the water quality in Flint, Mich.
That’s a lot of Trump jokes (he is the current president after all), and for most of those Wolf was hitting him where it really hurts: his relatively small bank account. But the fact is, there wasn’t a lot to grab onto for those who went into Wolf’s bit with premeditated indignation. The choices were Wolf’s occasional swearing (apparently not everybody has Netflix or heard the Billy Bush tape), an abortion joke (never a crowd pleaser) or the takedown of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. So, through creative interpretation or an inability to process the actual meaning of jokes, angry conservatives and members of the White House press corps decided to seize upon the Sanders angle. Wolf, they said, attacked the press secretary’s physical appearance. Shame. Except that’s not what happened at all. The meaning of the joke, a three-parter, was this: Sanders lords over the press corps and lies a lot, and day in and day out journalists let her get away with it. The only woman who had her appearance roasted by Wolf on Saturday night was Wolf herself.
Comedians have been offending audiences for as long as there have been jokes, and the fact that a bunch of journalists, politicians and political junkies take themselves a little too seriously is hardly the most surprising development of the Trump era. But the Wolf kerfuffle shows just how acute the problem of humorlessness has become in this golden age of outrage. A comedian punches up at politicians and media celebrities for 19 minutes on C-SPAN, a job she was hired to do, and right and left take it as their cue to ramp up hostilities in the never-ending war over who is more terrible.
What a funny country.