Critic’s Notebook: Michelle Wolf Did Her Job. It’s the Correspondents’ Dinner That Is the Problem.

Ms. Wolf’s most controversial jokes were about the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, partly because she made them to her face. Ms. Sanders was on the dais in place of Mr. Trump, who counterprogrammed the dinner with a campaign rally in Michigan.

The jokes were personal, yes, because character is personal.

Comparing Ms. Sanders to Aunt Lydia, the rigid enforcer for a misogynist state on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” jabs at Ms. Sanders’s role, not her looks. (The regal Ann Dowd, one of TV’s best character actresses, deserves better than that assumption.) Likewise her dig that Ms. Sanders “burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smokey eye” (unless “perfect” is now an insult). And likening her to a gym coach browbeating White House reporters was, like Melissa McCarthy’s imitation of Sean Spicer, a sendup of a public figure’s public performance.

Ms. Sanders, after all, is an adult woman who freely chose the job of spokeswoman for the president. That job once involved defending Mr. Trump’s tweet that claimed the “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski came to see him “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” The president, Ms. Sanders said, “fights fire with fire.” (Ms. Brzezinski nonetheless tweeted in Ms. Sanders’s support.)

If only Ms. Wolf had a Sarah Huckabee Sanders of her own. Instead she has the W.H.C.A., a group whose essential work is undermined by its highest-profile event, which is perennially trapped between provocation and caution, between the thirst to be edgy and the need to be liked.

The dinner — carried, probably unwisely, on live TV — is a multicourse tasting menu of mixed messages. It argues passionately for reporting without fear or favor, but shows reporters hobnobbing with their subjects like “Great Gatsby” extras. (The Times has not attended in a decade.)

It takes some doing to emerge from one event painted as simultaneously partisan and toothless, elitist and crude, adversarial and complicit. But the dinner somehow pulls it off.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/arts/television/michelle-wolf-white-house-correspondents-dinner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss