Many Republicans and Democrats were offended by comedian Michelle
Wolf’s performance at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association
dinner. Professional liar Sean Spicer said it was a “disgrace.” New
York Times writer Maggie Haberman falsely accused Wolf “intense
criticism of [Sarah Huckabee Sander’s] physical appearance.
>Political satire in less troubled times exaggerates
existing facts, pointing out the absurdities inherent in all ideologies,
or playing up smaller disagreements and failures for bigger laughs. But
Trump is hard to exaggerate—it is enough, it seems, merely to mirror
him. But why does faithful portrayal of fact-based reality elicit
laughter in a country that has a free press and a healthy public sphere
in which, it seems, reality is robustly represented? What do late-night
comedians reclaim from the Times?
Wolf’s performance at the White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner suggests an answer. She called the
President a racist, a truth as self-evident as it has proved difficult
for mainstream journalists to state. Her humor was obscene: she joked
about the President’s affair with a porn star; about his “pulling out,”
as promised (of the Paris agreement); and about the G.O.P.’s former
deputy finance chair Elliott Broidy’s $1.6 million payoff to a former
mistress. She also made mincemeat of White House staff, House and Senate
Republican leaders, the Democrats, and journalists on the right and
left, in their presence or in that of their colleagues.
