It’s amazing to me that the White House Correspondents dinner still exists in an age that contains Trump and Twitter.
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.
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 “the news.” 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.
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.
And now, about a dozen years later, Donald Trump is President.
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t watch all of it, and only saw snatches of her performance as it repeated throughout my social media feeds. I guess what I really saw was a meme, and my response was instinctive rather than analytic, and in this peripheral reading what I saw was not justice triumphing, but a person in a moment of power hurting someone else. Huckabee didn’t look like she was acting hurt, she looked like she was hurt, and it made me feel badly to see that.
I’m not sure why this is. Huckabee doesn’t align with my politics, so shouldn’t I take pleasure in seeing her receive her just comeuppance in front of the entire world, all dressed up as she was in her finest dress? Well, I don’t know. I have been furious in my life, wounded so deeply that all I wanted to do was verbally destroy a person, and I’ve followed through on that and let me assure you, there is no pleasure to be had in making somebody cry. It felt horrible to see the consequence of my words made manifest in the face of another human being. I don’t know, maybe now that I’m old and mortal, and a father to a young son, I’ve started to value mercy over justice. Maybe I just can’t find anything funny in this absurd mess we’re all in.
I honestly have no idea.
What is clear is that The White House Correspondent’s Dinner is a ridiculous anachronism, a kind of entertainment award’s show, that should just be cancelled. It was obviously designed as an insider event, an acknowledgment that although the media and the political class they covered had to sometime assume adversarial positions, they were still both privileged, with much more in common than not. And for one night they would all admit they were actually in the business of entertainment and just relax, but now they’re not so much on the same team. Now there are many teams, each one feeding on whatever it is that’s bubbled up from our collective unconscious and now lives in the swampland of social media. Its’ a war now, one with too many fronts to count, and humour is hard to find.