Media people have long worried about the impact of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on journalism. The worry is that this will give the press the impression that it is too friendly with the politicians it reports on. But what impact does this have on comedy?
A high-ceilinged hotel ballroom filled with TV hosts and network executives is a tough space for stand-up, but neither is an awards show. Trevor Noah was funnier at dinner two years ago than he was at this year’s Grammys.
The Conflict of a Murderer (George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Conan O’Brien, Wanda Sykes) took on this assignment because it is one of the most eye-catching live comedy sets of the year. And there was a really great performance (Stephen Colbert), some very good ones (Seth Meyers, Larry Wilmore) and one so excitingly biting (Michelle Wolf) that the next year they replaced the comic with a historian.
Colin Jost’s set this year doesn’t belong in that pantheon. Without his Weekend Update partner Michael Che by his side, he seemed subdued, awkward and less confident than usual. With long pauses between jokes, his eyes darting back and forth, he occasionally took a sip of water and noticed at least once that im There was no laughter in the room. His jokes relied more on puns than on a specific or novel perspective. “There are some incredible news organizations here,” began one of his more testy jokes, ending with, “Some credible ones, too.”
He directed major fire at former President Donald J. Trump. “With OJ dead, who is the frontrunner for VP?” he asked. “Diddy?” Like Biden, Jost has always benefited from low expectations. Nobody that good looking could be funny, right? But he’s grown into his role on “Saturday Night Live” and proven himself to be a particularly strong straight man, well-versed in the comedy of embarrassment. You could see his timing in one of the stranger moments when he said Robert Kennedy Jr. could be the third Catholic president, and the C-SPAN camera showed President Biden (the second) clapping. A beat later, Jost retracted Kennedy’s chances: “As his vaccination card says, he has no chance.”
For the third year in a row, President Biden’s age played a big role in the comedy (“Technology wasn’t invented when he was in high school,” Jost said of Biden), even in the president’s own stage. Two years ago Biden joked that he was friends with Calvin Coolidge. Last year he referred to his “buddy Jimmy Madison.” This time the president took a slightly different and more confrontational approach. “Age is a problem,” he said early on. “I’m a grown man competing against a six-year-old.”
Can jokes help defuse the problem? They don’t hurt. Ronald Reagan addressed concerns about his age humorously, joking at a dinner that he was there when the wheel was invented. People tend to overestimate the power of comedians’ jokes and underestimate the power of politicians’ jokes. Both Trump and former President Barack Obama forged bonds with their voters through their sense of humor. Biden isn’t as funny as his two predecessors, but there’s an easy, towel-grabbing warmth to his jokey sides that’s a key part of his appeal. That’s why appearing on Howard Stern last week was such a smart move, as unimaginable as it would have been a few decades ago.
Trump never showed up to the correspondent’s dinner during his time in the White House, and his inability to laugh at himself represents a vulnerability. President Biden often seems to try to bait him with ridicule (he called him “Sleepy Don”) and shows quite convincingly that he enjoys being made fun of. Of course, it helps that the comics at his dinners, Noah and Roy Wood Jr., only gently roasted him. But their performances were a Bill Hicks polemic compared to Jost’s jokes.
Jost’s strongest moment came at the end, when he paid emotional tribute to his grandfather – a recently deceased firefighter and Biden supporter – and then espoused the virtues of decency. This serious argument would have fit in a political convention or civics class, but it was unusual to hear in this setting. A stand-up comedian’s healthy sincerity can be scarier than any transgressive joke. But we live in frightening times. Jost began by saying he was honored to be here for what would likely be “the last White House correspondents’ dinner, judging by current state polls.”
In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, Roy Wood Jr. told Astead W. Herndon that the dinner correspondent job was “one of the unique events in stand-up comedy that really reflects where we are as.” Land stand.” exact time.”
If so, the mood of the nation was nervous.
Source link
2024-04-28 14:34:58
www.nytimes.com
