I thought it was a solid routine. The groan-inducing abortion set-up, which had to be groan-inducing to get her to the punchline, was off-key. Otherwise, most of the jokes landed and some landed pretty hard.cinepro wrote:This seems to be a step in the evolution of what these dinners could be, and I hope it is corrected back to something that is more civil. I don't object to "calling out" the people in power using humor, but Wolf's speech just wasn't that funny. Sure, being vulgar and mean can sometimes be very funny (especially if it's done with some wit), but just being mean and vulgar in and of themselves doesn't mean you're being funny.
But if this is what we want, the real test will be to see if in the future a democratic administration invites a conservative firebrand to "roast" the President. I'd love to see Anne Coulter go 15 minutes in that room with a democrat in the White House.
We've gone through this dance a few times before. Stephen Colbert called George W. Bush a lying warmonger to his face to the point that it got uncomfortable. He got some flack for it even though it was probably the best comic bit ever done at these dinners. George W. Bush for his part did a high-larious bit about not being able to find WMD's that was well received by the crowd because nothing is funnier than deceiving a nation into a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Roasting the powerful has been part of the event for a long time now. That's partially why the reaction to the WHCD who hired a comedian specifically for that purpose acting all upset that she did what she was hired to do is so eyeroll worthy.
Ann Coulter just isn't funny. One of the odd things about American conservatism is there are no funny conservatives. Or, rather, the funny ones are almost to a person libertarian. It's hard not to read this as social conservatism being tightly correlated with being humorless. There's a ton of writing on why this may be, including some academic research into the phenomenon, but I don't think there's an entirely satisfactory explanation out there.
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Regarding the reaction to the jokes as attacking Sanders for her appearance, that's just ridiculous. The Haberman's of the world continue to be awful. The eye makeup bit is where she references her appearance, but the point of the joke is about Sanders lying. The makeup line isn't negative. If anything, it's a compliment. The only other thing that could be construed as a reference to her appearance is when she is compared to Aunt Lydia in Hand Maiden's tale. And while there is some vague resemblance, that joke is entirely about comparing villainy. To call that an intense disparagement of her looks, a person would have to think that Aunt Lydia looks terrible, Sanders looks like her, and infer that the joke is saying she looks terrible like her. That's both a stupid misreading of what's going on, and the listener doing all the disparaging of looks work themselves. Haberman actually argued that comparing to her to someone who divides people up into softball teams was attacking her appearence too. That makes even less sense than the first two. It implies Maggie Haberman thinks that softball coaches are ugly. It's a platonic ideal of "the calls are coming from inside the house".
Meanwhile, the routine did include a actual dig on McConnell's turkey neck and no one seems to be saying a thing about that.
All of this makes it look like they are falling over themselves to prove how objective and unbiased they are by criticizing someone calling a serial liar a liar. Or maybe her line about the Trump driving business for the media figures in the crowd hit a little too hard.
Then on top of all this, it's hard not to notice that the president of the United States is essentially a terrible insult comic whose main approach to almost anything is semi-incoherent bullying. If her comic routine makes you grab your fainting coach, I don't know how you aren't apoplectic every single day at Republican leadership and given that they aren't, I call shenanigans on this performative outrage.
I used to think the WHCD was something that should just die already, but incidents like this make me wonder if it performs a service in showing what empty shills the people at them are.