WHCA Dinner Cancels Comedian After White House Complains
The Nerd Prom chickens out.
Variety (“White House Correspondents’ Association Cancels Plans to Feature Comedian Amber Ruffin at Annual Dinner“):
The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news organizations during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The journalism group, which has seen its control over interactions with Trump eroded in recent weeks, made the decision after Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, raised comments Ruffin has made in the past that are critical of Trump. Earlier this week, Ruffin told a podcast backed by The Daily Beast that she would not try to make sure her jokes targeted all sides of the political spectrum as the WHCA had requested, and likened the Trump administration to “kind of a bunch of murderers.” Playing to both sides “makes them feel like human beings,” she said, “cause they’re not.”
[…]
“The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels wrote to members in a statement.
“For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year,” he added. “As the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.
President Donald Trump will not be attending the dinner.
These dinners have long been rather odd, with Presidents showing up to get roasted by comedians and then taking a turn doing a stand-up routine of their own in front of journalists whose job it is to report on them.* That’s been especially problematic in the post-Watergate era, in which the relationship between the press and politicians has been openly adversarial.
Yet, with some rare uncomfortable exceptions (Stephen Colbert’s 2006 roasting of George W. Bush comes to mind), they’ve generally been a welcome respite from the tensions of Washington politics. Bill Clinton and both George Bushes were exceptionally good sports about the whole thing.
The current president is arguably a more natural showman than his predecessors, but his sense of humor is decidedly not strong on self-deprecation. While every other President since Calvin Coolidge way back in 1924 has attended these dinners at least once while in office, Trump has consistently refused. (He did famously attend in 2011, where he was roasted by Obama.)
Regardless, to the extent it makes sense to have a political comic at these events, Ruffin was a poor choice. Her style is just too harsh for what should be a lighthearted event. Historically, the likes of Bob Hope, Danny Thomas, Ed Sullivan, Rich Little, and Jay Leno performed. More strident comics, such as Michelle Wolf in 2018, almost always bomb.
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*This was a favorite topic of our late co-blogger, Doug Mataconis. See, for example
- Tom Brokaw Disses Nerdprom (April 2013)
- Nerd Prom Is Broken, But So Is Our Political Culture (April 2015)
- White House Correspondents Dinner Once Again Demonstrates Why It Shouldn’t Exist (April 2018)
This post is the answer to your question of why academia capitulated to the Trump administration so quickly: because too many of you are the sort of people who would write something like this
Dish it out-yes; take it-no.
Historically, our president wasn’t a neofascist thug who called for Hitlerian generals, said Hitler did some good things, was compared to Hitler by his own VP and chief of staff, threatened Canada, surrendered to Russia, incited a terror on Congress, and is now disappearing international students and other legal residents into “detention centers.”
So events should not necessarily aspire to lightheartedness Because Historically.
Times have changed. Priors ought to be updated accordingly.
The WHCA cancellation of Ruffin’s appearance is valid: freedom of speech does not equal freedom from consequences, as liberals have repeatedly noted during the censorship dustups of the past two decades.
The problem here is the double standard of the conservative and contrarion scolds who’ve scoffed at this reminder. These pompous windbags really need to stop lecturing the left about free speech when they continually fail to hold themselves to their own standards. As usual from Amerikkka’s hypocritical patriarchy, cancel culture is a terrible affront…except when they do it (see Kaepernick, Colin).
Now the response from the WHCA should be to make the dinner an internal affair and invite no one except WH correspondents and their spouses/dates. And no camera or microphones.
But they won’t.
@Scott:
And the response from the correspondents should be, I need to clean out the everything drawer that night as it is overflowing.
Well, I guess comedy is only legal again on Twitter.
But seriously, I think this is actually a story of import, insofar as it illustrates, quite clearly, that the administration and the MAGA movement are full of it when it comes to its concerns about people not being able to make jokes anymore and their alleged fealty to free speech.
So on the one hand, this is a minor story in comparison to, say, an international students being disappeared and deported for having written an op/ed, but on the other, it is actually a very telling one as it pertains to the contradictions and authoritarian lies this group tells us all on a regular basis.
Just another bit of erosion within a broader torrent.
The WHCA dinner is an expression of the co-dependence of the prez and the careerist correspondents. That the dinner is an absurdity that should not exist does not change that this is groveling by the correspondents. You may regret that “post-Watergate” the relationship has been adversarial. I myself feel gotcha journalism is distasteful and counterproductive. But if there’s ever been a time for adversarial journalism, surely it’s now. Ruffin seems the only one involved with any integrity.
The last two were Roy Wood, Jr. and Trevor Noah, both of whom are very political. And not long before that, Hasan Minhaj and Larry Willmore. If you go back over a decade you do get Conan, but before that is Jimmy Kimmel, who isn’t as political and the others I have listed, but is also has an edge to his comedy.
@Steven L. Taylor: Does it even count as political when you’re in a room full of press, officials, and celebrities who agree with your every word?
@Steven L. Taylor: I haven’t heard the acts in recent years, although I’ve seen the list. I just don’t think it helps the credibility of the WHCA to invite highly ideological comics. (It’s true that George Carlin and Richard Pryor were invited decades ago, but I think while they were still doing more mainstream, Carson-appropriate acts.)
@James Joyner:
That is a fair area of discussion, to a degree. But it raises a deeper question as to why the most powerful man in the world can’t handle some jokes. But that is also a question for more normal times.
These are not normal times and again I say: MAGA has been telling us that one of the things that is ruining America is that people can’t tell jokes anymore. And yet, they can’t hear these jokes. Of course, what they mean is that they want to be able to tell sexist and racist jokes, because it puts them in a position of power and dominance. They can’t have some Black woman making fun of Trump!
And Trump himself claims to be the president of free speech. But that is clearly a bunch of bullshit.
I get where you are coming from, and I think it is a long-standing position you have had. But I think you are looking at this from the wrong angle.
I will note, again, just in case it isn’t clear: I think this is a very minor story. I just think it is nonetheless quite illustrative of the real positions of this president, his administration, and his supporters.
But that this event isn’t happening isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things.
@Fortune:..who agree with your every word?
Nothing political about the cabinet meeting with President Musk and First Lady Donalda and a table full of lickspittles who will not challenge their masters.
Won’t be any disagreement there.
Trump holds Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk to talk DOGE and tariffs
Trump doesn’t have a sense of humor beyond a sort of Nelson Muntz level, “Haw haw”. He’s a bully, utterly devoid of empathy, incapable of understanding human beings as anything but tools or fools. He’s a crashing bore who only entertains other bores.
@Fortune: That situation would seem to be a victory of politics on one side if one understands politics as “warfare by other means” for internal relations in the same that diplomacy is so defined for the external.
@James Joyner:
@Steven L. Taylor:
Anything not Carson-appropriate is highly ideological, as if completely comfortable and funny to powerful white males isn’t an ideology.
That’s the MAGA view as put forward by Trump in his affronts to the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian, ain’t it?
Somebody help me out here: It seems that free speech loving MAGA onservatives love ‘cancel culture’ when they’re the ones doing the canceling. Is that true?
@al Ameda: They’re cancelling people they think deserve to be cancelled. No cognitive dissonance at all. Perfectly reasonable and perfectly human.
Everyone loves cancelling their opponents and the people they think “have nothing to offer” to the conversation. It’s why we applaud our hosts when they ban someone. It’s not an unreasonable proposition at all–except for the cancelled person. (And who cares what they think?)
@just nutha:
I on’t think it’s that MAGA believes their opponents have “nothing to offer so” much as they’ve convinced themselves that anyone who’s against Trump is actively evil. Hillary Clinton is evil. The Deep State is evil. The Bidens are evil.
Another pillar of democracy crumbles.
This isn’t the most immediately consequential crumbling we’ve seen in the past week, but it shows that the press isn’t willing to challenge the administration even as a joke. I don’t have faith in their ability to muster a spine on something more relevant if they will throw away a hundred years of tradition to avoid lightly ruffling Dear Leader’s feathers.
Perhaps Amber Ruffin was not the right choice for this year, but was everyone else unavailable? Perhaps Tony Hinchcliff? He did great at that Trump rally in MSG. Some good, old-fashioned conservative humor from a man who is willing to call a spade a spade* and Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
Someone who can put the ugliness of America on full display.
*: this is an exaggeration. I expect Mr. Hinchcliff does not use antiquated racial epithets, opting for a more current vocabulary.
@gVOR10:
I think you have grossly misinterpreted the intent of the White House Correspondents Dinner. It’s about comity, and coming together with gentle ribbing to say that sure, we may all have our differences on matters that kills countless people, but we can all laugh at ourselves, so isn’t that nice?
It’s not really adversarial. The adversarial part is playful, and is needed for that gentle ribbing that shows we are all the same underneath, even if some of us order wars of choice that kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, or attempt to strip rights from an entire class of Americans based on skin color or gender, or order drone strikes against American citizens abroad, or encourage people to drink bleach and mismanage a pandemic, or wear a tan suit. It’s really all about togetherness.
And in these fraught political times, wouldn’t we all be reassured to know that the elites can laugh at themselves. Maybe they could get a foreign comedian, and then have jackbooted thugs with masks abduct her and ship her off to El Salvador to end the set. And the President could joke about it (“I wouldn’t want to end up where she’s going… haha”), and everyone would gently applaud.
That is the level of adversarial interaction that the press cannot muster.
Dr. Joyner: “That’s been especially problematic in the post-Watergate era, in which the relationship between the press and politicians has been openly adversarial.”
You seem to ignore/neglect 2008-2016, which many believe “gave us Trump”. Moreover, those who were part of the journo-list scam are often cited here positively as “experts”. So “openly adversarial” seems like a pretty big stretch.
Also, as Dr. SLT notes, Jimmy Kimmel did one of the best WHCA dinners ever. But SLT doesn’t note that Kimmel loved 44, and hence his “roast” was friendly and kind (and hilarious).
Yet everyone who has commented on this post betrays their “orange man bad” mentality, which is getting very tired. I don’t doubt that President Trump is thin-skinned, but allow me to argue to the commenters here that at this moment, metaphorically speaking, Lenny Bruce *is* afraid – and that should give us all pause.
@CSK: I was seeing “people who ‘have nothing to offer'” as a second separate category. I guess I should have used “or.”
@Meh:
Indeed!
@Meh:
But what if — and hear me out on this — what if the orange man is bad?
I’m tired of him being bad.
I’d rather him get a sponsorship deal from the Florida citrus growers, and tell everyone that he loves Florida navel oranges and this is why he wears ridiculous makeup, rather than him fundamentally trying to destroy everything that has made America great and bring back everything that made America the racist and aristocratic shithole that the founding fathers envisioned, where only white men with property were important.
(Remember, the Federalists didn’t think we needed a Bill of Rights — Trump’s America is what many of our founding fathers wanted)
@Gustopher:
That “pillar” crumbled in 2016 when the press decided Hillary’s recipe-sharing emails were a bigger scandal than Trump being a Putin-puppet pedophile.
@Meh: ” Moreover, those who were part of the journo-list scam are often cited here positively as “experts”.”
Man, reaching back for the oldies! Journo-list, wow, the all-purpose scandal that proved everything right wing nutballs claimed about journalism was true.
It’s cool that you can dredge up the name of this so-called scandal from the slimy depths of your subconscious, but without going to Conservapedia or some other loser site, can you tell us what it was actually about?
“Well, ya see, there were journalists and they were all liberals and they were all on this list and, um, that proves my point.”
Journo-list. Geeze. If you were only released from the mental institution yesterday, then it’s understandable why this springs to mind. Otherwise you might as well start screaming about all those Commies in the State department.
@wr:
“Journo-list. Geeze. If you were only released from the mental institution yesterday, then it’s understandable why this springs to mind”.
It would be awesome if the mental institution in question never let me out. Instead, they gave me a couple of degrees and now I get to teach undergrads that history didn’t begin when they turned 18.
@Gustopher:
“(Remember, the Federalists didn’t think we needed a Bill of Rights — Trump’s America is what many of our founding fathers wanted)”
This is a distortion at best but I sincerely (really, no snark) appreciate this comment. Your reference to Federalist 84 is apt, but the argument therein was that the national government would be constrained by the enumerated powers in Article I, section 8. That Hamilton was a lying pos monarchist whose writings should be dismissed as propaganda is perhaps a topic for another day.
@Gustopher:
“But what if — and hear me out on this — what if the orange man is bad?
I’m tired of him being bad.”
The orange man *is* bad. As was the racist, condescending prick who preceded him. And as was the racist condescending prick who was president before the bad orange man (although we weren’t allowed to say so). And as was … every president in the history of our country
So what now? Please, you, or anyone here, tell me what would make things better. If you have enough money and are as pretentious as the OTB commentator with the fake cowboy hat who can afford to move to one of the most posh neighborhoods in London so as to avoid living next to people like my family and friends (i.e. the wretched refuse of America), then perhaps that’s the solution.
Otherwise, JFC, can we please get some perspective?
@wr: JournoList is indeed a blast from the past. What’s amusing is that, even when it broke—way back in 2010—both Doug and I wrote several posts wondering what the big deal was.
@Meh:
Yet, one of these things is not like the other.
So, yes, perspective would be nice.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Agreed. A buddy from grad school and I both had “angry young grad student syndrome” early on and for whatever reason that reemerged yesterday and I’m not exactly proud of it. Thank you for the measured engagement.
@Meh: No worries. These are times that try the nerves, to be sure.