It’s amazing to me that the White House Correspondents dinner still exists in an age that contains Trump and Twitter.<\/p>\n
The event first came to my attention back in 2006 when Stephen Colbert delivered a lacerating, satiric monologue to George W. Bush and his dubious assembly. I was astonished and exhilarated by the performance. It struck me as incredibly brave, a truly patriotic display of dissent that deserved all the awards. It was the sort of thing I could imagine being taught in university classes.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Of course, this was during the era of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, and I was already a huge fan of all things Colbert. The emergence of their shows changed the way that I, and a lot of people, digested their news. Network News Hours were no longer the sole, or even primary means of disseminating \u201cthe news.\u201d The dull, superficial theatre of traditional networks was giving way to the faster, more entertaining curation of the Comedy Network. News was changing, becoming something like sketch comedy, and each night we got to choose what sort of news we wanted. Colbert and Stewart were the new Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Stewart and Colbert’s were always very persuasive and funny, and it was easy enough to forget that they were in no way balanced or objective, but as Stewart was always at pains to point out, he was performing comedy, not providing a comprehensive analysis of American politics. Nevertheless, it was around this point that we all started to migrate into separate news camps, existing happily amidst our tribe without ever having to intersect with an idea outside of our chosen position. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n And now, about a dozen years later, Donald Trump is President.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n It’s my theory that the age of Trump has put a kind of freeze on comedy. You simply cannot satirize the man, as everything he does is so far beyond the range of expectation that he completely obliterates the idea of expectation, and without that there can be no satire. I mean, not a single person on the planet would be surprised if one day he removed his human face on TV. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To make matters worse, we’re so polarized in our beliefs that we no longer have a shared understanding of what is true or what should be funny. People aren’t even certain where power lies right now– just that they have enemies, so, so many enemies! And one of the shadows cast by living this way is that comedy has become little more than simply mocking your enemies. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n At any rate, this brings me to the White House Correspondents Dinner that just took place, the one that featured Michelle Wolf from the Daily Show taking the piss out of Sarah Huckabee. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n