Comedian Michelle Wolf
Imagine that your knees are deeply bruised. Now imagine that someone pours vinegar and sprinkles salt on it. Wait, there is more. Now imagine that someone smoothens the bruises with a file. That’s what comedian Michelle Wolf did at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
This morning, as Wolf’s brutal takedowns of the movers and shakers in Washington D.C., starting with President Donald Trump, are predictably dividing those who watched the performance, I have no particular objection to it. She lived up to her unsparing humor. If you deliberately choose to stick your hand inside a hornets’ nest, you cannot complain against being repeatedly stung. The headliner at this annual dinner is not there to mollycoddle the powers-that-be. They are there to make people wince. Wolf did that repeatedly as many in the audience groaned.
Her vicious takedown of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders barely three feet away from where the latter sat was quite extraordinary.
“Every time Sarah steps up to the podium, I get excited,” Wolf said and continued. “I’m not really sure what we’re going to get, you know? A press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. ‘It’s shirts and skins, and this time don’t be such a little bitch, Jim Acosta.” Acosta is CNN’s White House correspondent routinely clashes with Sanders.
“I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies,” Wolf said in a rather weirdly visualized ritual. Burning facts and using its ash to create smoky eyes is actually quite literary.
One could clearly see that Sanders was not at all amused even as Wolf piled on, “I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Is it Sarah Sanders, is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is it Cousin Huckabee, is it Aunt Huckabee Sanders? What’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Ah I Know, Aunt Coulter.” Coulter is a witheringly insolent wingnut.
If the dinner organizers’ intention was to go for anodyne, inoffensive entertainment, they should have altogether avoided Wolf whose reputation for abrasive comedy is quite well-known.But I suspect the organizers knew what they had paid for and invited her quite consciously.
There are already demands for the White House Correspondents’ Association to explain their choice. To which the association must tell its critics to go take a hike. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, himself a subject of frequent ridicule once, tweeted saying the association needs to respond “since they paid for her (Wolf) to speak.” This from a man who routinely fudged facts from the official podium.
The tenor of Wolf’s act was clear from the get-go when she said, “Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with a Trump, let’s get this over with.”
“It’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up. Unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000,” she said. Of Trump she said, “I would drag him here myself, but it turns out that the president of the United States is the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab. He said it first. Yeah, he did. You remember? Good.”
In another particularly brutal crack she said of Vice President Mike Pence, “He thinks abortion is murder. Which first of all don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it, you gotta get that baby out of there. And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want, I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion, you know, unless it’s the one you got for your secret mistress.”
Wolf’s routine was full of such vicious attacks which burned many in the process. It is more than likely that Wolf’s presence would reinforce the ludicrous narrative disingenuously peddled by the president about a biased “elite liberal” media out to get him.
As an aside, I have never understood the idea of describing journalists as “elite” because a vast majority—with the exception of some broadcast media superstars—is made of those who struggle to survive with barely survival salaries. It is because of the nature of their profession which puts them in the midst of the real power elite, as embodied by the president himself, that they get ridiculously branded as elite themselves.
Wolf’s attack on Sanders appears to have made many journalists uncomfortable. Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent of the New York Times, tweeted: “That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.”
To which Wolf responded in a tweet saying, “Hey mags! All these jokes were about her despicable behavior. Sounds like you have some thoughts about her looks though?”
Like I said at the beginning, I have no particular objection to Wolf’s gig. If some newspaper is willing to give her the job and if the White House press office grants her the credentials she should consider becoming an occasional White House correspondent.