Michelle Wolf’s routine at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last weekend was comedically vicious and unsparing. Eviscerating White House officials, up to and including the president, in the face of an audience that grew increasingly restive, she riffed off of the hypocrisy and madness of America’s political leadership and Trump-enabling media. With jokes that took as a given Donald Trump’s serial assaults on women and the daily dispensing of lies from the White House, Wolf shocked the audience because she didn’t care to soften the full horror of our political moment, while those who had invited her obviously expected her to play by a more jovial and forgiving set of rules. That powerful people don’t want their misdeeds to be exposed is one the eternal cliches of our world; to see Wolf make this audience squirm was to see such exposure in action.
The absurdity of asking a comedian to do a political roast, and then to be offended when that comedian hits too close to home, should be plain to all. The criticism that Wolf wasn’t funny is silly; her jokes may not have been laugh-out-loud funny, but they were humorous in a sharper, cerebral manner. The truth is, she’s being criticized for attacking the powerful — both the Trump administration and any media figures who think it’s acceptable to cavort with those they cover — in an utterly disrespectful and insulting way. In implicitly asserting the indefensibility of this president and any who cover for him, Wolf reminded us that the powerful depend on their lessers’ willingness to respect their power; in showing no respect, but rather flashes of anger and righteousness, Wolf committed the ultimate sin of reminding them that they may not be as powerful as they believe. To accomplish this with words and wit, Wolf conducted a lightning incursion of accountability and egalitarian spirit into a lion’s den of elitist self-congratulation.
Wolf is being criticized for being inappropriate; but the whole of her routine does not even begin to match the moral obscenity, cruelty, and ignorance of Donald Trump last week, when he said of the Paralympics that, “it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could.” This is what truly vicious and inappropriate language sounds like: words uttered by the most powerful man in the world about a group of people who live with challenges most of us will never have to deal with, in a way that makes them sounds like freaks who can only be tolerated for short periods of time. Critics of Wolf are catastrophically wrong: Donald Trump and his defenders deserve every bit of truth-telling that our fellow citizens can throw at them.
