White House correspondents dinner: is there still space for humour?
2024-04-26 00:27:15
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Good evening, good evening. Here we are, the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Like a.
porn star says when she's about to have sex with a Trump, let's get this over with. It's a Washington tradition dating back almost 100 years, the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, where America's political class dresses up in its finery for a night of comedic roasting and self-deprecation. You might think I don't like Rupert Murdoch.
How could I dislike a guy who makes me look like Harry Styles? Call me old.
The so-called nerd prom is attended by top government officials, celebs, the media, of course, and usually the president. But over the last few years, one figure has been conspicuous.
by his absence. The leader of our country is not here. And that's because he lives in Moscow. It is a very long flight. As for the other guy, I think he's in Pennsylvania because he can't take.
a joke. We're talking about Donald Trump. So what does this event tell us about the relationship between the White House, the press, and free speech? in the age of Trump? And in an era when the reality of mainstream politics is often beyond satire, are the jokes just not funny anymore?
I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
What's the best joke you've written for, Joe Biden?
Oh, you know, that would be to violate a norm. All of these things are collaborative, so I won't take credit or blame for that matter.
Jeff Nussbaum is a former speechwriter for Joe Biden and for Al Gore, who oversaw the speechwriting operation for several Democratic conventions. He has intimate knowledge of how these events go. So, Jeff, great to have you on. You've been there, you've been in the room when these things are organized. I myself remember going to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
I'm curious to know whether you think the officials, not just the hacks, not just the journalists, but government officials, politicians, political aides, do. they look forward to this.
event and events like it? Well, this one is part of what in Washington, D.C., we sometimes call silly season. So there are several of these dinners, black tie, or the case of one called the Great Iron Dinner, white tie, where official Washington comes together to laugh, to hear from elected officials, to drink. And so people do look forward to it. And one of the things that's very funny in D.C.
is everyone bemoans it. Oh, are you going to this? I have to go to that. But deep down, everyone really does love it. And what is it about that they love?
I think that they like that. in many ways. it's a throwback to a different era of governing. It's a throwback to a time when everyone, even if you disagreed, could be in the same room, could share a drink, could laugh together. You know, I'm a defender of these dinners.
I actually think that they make way for progress, that if you're in the room with someone, you can disagree with, that, you can laugh at yourself and they can laugh at you and you can laugh at them. I think it serves as a release valve on all the pressure and tension that builds up through the act of governing. So you're not just.
a practitioner of the political speech, the writer of them. You're a real student of it, as a formula, the author of a book on the undelivered speeches, the speeches that were written but never got delivered through our history, a book called Undelivered. But just give us a bit of a sense of the history, the history of some of the sort of memorable moments that have happened at these dinners. What are some of the sort of key standout moments that have made this silly season, as Washingtonians often call it, a fixed part of the calendar, the political calendar there in D.C.?
A couple of things. One is that I often say that the only truly safe form of humor is self-deprecation, because you're never going to offend the victim of your humor, because you yourself are the victim of your humor. And self-deprecation serves a lot of important roles, one of which is when you are a speaker at these dinners, when an elected official, they are, metaphorically and literally from the lectern, from the podium, above their audience. And so self-deprecation brings you down a peg, connects to the audience, shows that you can be relatable. And traditionally, the ones that have historically resonated and to this day continue to resonate are the dinners where the powerful used self-deprecation to deal with some ongoing concern or challenge or scandal.
So in the 1958 gridiron dinner, President John F. Kennedy famously shared a fake telegram from his wealthy and powerful father. And he read it out loud and said, Dear Jack, don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide. So the idea, the sort of scandal looming in the air, hovering in the air, was that John F.
Kennedy's powerful father was buying votes to buy him the presidency. More recently, at a slightly different dinner called the Alfalfa Club Dinner in 2019, John Kerry... This is a room, by the way, in D.C. where I say, if you believe that there is a conspiracy of wealth and power in this world, this room will confirm all of those beliefs. So John Kerry looks at his table mate, Mike Bloomberg, and says, usually when I'm next to someone, this rich, I propose.
So it's these moments where people are willing to poke fun at themselves, but also take on ongoing scandals.
And in that case, by the way, Kerry, referring to the fact that he had famously married wealthy. Exactly. Marrying the heiress, Theresa Hines.
Exactly right. And people don't even remember, early in Obama's presidency, there was a slight scandal when Air Force One, the president's plane, flew quite low over Manhattan, terrifying people, because obviously in Manhattan, you know, a low-flying plane brings back the fear of September 11th. People were terrified, and that became a bit of a scandal because it was revealed that they were doing this so they could get the publicity photos of the plane for your sort of in-flight safety pamphlet. And so Obama at that, you know, did this joke, said, you know, Sasha and Malia are not here tonight. I don't care whose kids you are.
You can't take Air Force One for a joy ride over Manhattan. And so even that little mini scandal, it is a way of lancing the boil and basically saying, look, let's not get overheated about this. Let's just laugh about it.
Just on the point of Obama, I read somewhere that Obama was difficult to write for because he would read these jokes in advance and say, although, by the way, he was a really good deliverer of a joke, he would say, why am I attacking me? I want to lay into the other guy. I mean, as a speechwriter for these events, is that tricky to give the principal, the politician, ammunition against themselves when they would much rather take a pop at their opponents?
Yes. So this is a recurring challenge, which is a lot of these elected officials, a lot of politicians, are conditioned through their careers to use an opportunity, any opportunity, to go on the attack, right? There's even these adages in politics, right? If you're defending, you're losing. If you're explaining, you're losing.
So, even when it comes to humor, they want to use it as a weapon. And what I often find myself saying is it is a weapon, but to earn the right to use it on someone else, you have to show that you can use it on yourself. And Mark Katz, who's a guy who wrote for several of these dinners, wrote a book called Clinton and Me, where he talks at length about how, early in these events, Bill Clinton really struggled with the idea that he should do anything other than attack opponents. Obama, too, used this to attack people to such powerful effect that some people give him credit in 2011, for he just had this withering series of jokes directed at Donald Trump, who was in the audience. People give him credit for goading Donald Trump into running for president.
So I joke that his jokes in 2011 were simultaneously the best and worst jokes ever delivered at this dinner. Best because they were funny, worst because they got Donald Trump to run for president. Why don't we hear a little bit of?
that famous speech and where we hear Obama in action, where his target is not himself, but then a man who was just in public life. He wasn't yet even officially a politician. All kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience.
For example,
no, seriously, just recently in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice.
at the Steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Little John or Meatloaf.
You fired, Gary Busey.
And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. So what about that, Jeff, since we're on it? I mean, do you buy the theory that it was the sheer humiliation of that moment? And, you know, we're on audio here rather than video, but if you would see the sort of burning cheeks, resentment that Trump is displaying during that riff from Obama, do you buy the theory that it was that humiliation at that dinner that prompted Trump to think my only revenge is to run for president?
Not fully. In point of fact, Donald Trump had flirted with running for president for 20 years. He had been making trips repeatedly to New Hampshire. He had mentioned it on other talk shows. So this was something clearly that had been on Donald Trump's mind.
So I don't think, I don't think Obama's jokes fully goaded him into ultimately doing it. But I do think that that laughter, that humiliation, helped solidify the chip that Donald Trump has carried on his shoulder every day since about wanting to show the elites, not that he was one of them, but in a way that he was superior to them.
We'll come back to Trump in a minute. I want to just pick up your point a moment or so ago, when you said that it is a very useful weapon in the hands of a skilled politician because it can diffuse what had been a sort of rumbling, doubt or scandal. You know, Kennedy, accused of being the son of a corrupt father, deals with it head on through a joke. If you were in the room writing for Joe Biden as we approach this weekend, what issue do you think needs diffusing for Joe Biden? I think we can guess.
But how would you do it through a joke?
Well, first of all, President Biden has done quite well at these dinners in the past, and I think he'll do well again, certainly dispensing with age. And going back, I was doing some research and looking that several of Ronald Reagan's White House correspondent dinner speeches were a series of age jokes. So that's part of it. But remember, humor can also make a very serious point. So, yes, you can deal with ongoing challenges and scandals.
But for me, the perfect joke is the one that not only is funny, but reminds people of everything you've accomplished.
And that's a hard line to tread, I suppose, because if you seem to be bragging, that's against the spirit of the occasion, which is meant to be, as you say, self-deprecating. Is Joe Biden one of those presidents who is skilled at the business of comedy? I mentioned how Obama was really admired as just a man who could really land a punchline. Just on the business of being a sort of comic writer, can Biden pull that off?
He can, and he has. I think he would tell you that it's not his greatest strength, but he can. He knows the rooms. He knows what's funny. He's done more than adequately.
well. I often think about how funny it is, the number of skills in America we expect our presidents to have, and the fact that comedian is one of them, is somewhat ridiculous. In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office.
I'll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions, and cheerfully walk away.
Just tell me whether you've had any clients, as it were, any presidents, politicians, who would refuse to make jokes about certain areas, would say, no, that's off limits. I'm not going to joke about that.
Well, the funny thing happens when I work with folks, when we're writing jokes, which is they really make a mind shift. I think, partly because so much of a public official's life is compartmentalized, that now I'm going to do policy, and now I'm going to do fundraising. And so I've watched several of the folks for whom I've worked say, okay, now we're going to tell jokes. And all of a sudden, they're looser, or they'll pour a glass of scotch, or they'll be more willing to swear. So they kind of get that.
this is a chance to loosen up and be a little different. So, more often than not, I'm the one reminding them that no joke is so funny that it's worth deeply offending a constituency or ruining a relationship. I will say years ago, I had one client, a governor, who had a member of his staff saying, we need a joke about abortion. And I remember saying, we definitely do not need a joke about abortion.
Yeah, that would be one area where you just don't get it.
So we talked just a bit before about Donald Trump and how. perhaps it was always thought that maybe he was ignited in his presidential ambitions, or those ambitions were accelerated by the experience of being on the receiving end, being the butt of jokes at one of these occasions. But you've written recently that you think actually something, even if that wasn't the turning point, that there has been a change in the Trump era, the last 10 years or so, that has changed how these dinners work. And even if they do work, just explain to us what this thought of yours is on the changing face of these comedic nights. Absolutely.
First of all, there's nothing.
less funny than dissecting humor. But I spend a lot of time giving thought to why the humor works or why it doesn't. And the last couple of years, as I've been in several of these dinners, there has been a change. And it's hard to characterize, but you had a couple of years ago, former Vice President Mike Pence at the gridiron dinner, getting very serious and steely and angrily talking about Donald Trump, putting his family and our democracy at risk. You have Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, making a plea to her fellow Republicans, and she said, my fellow Republicans, please support Ukraine.
And I just was overwhelmed at that time by. there's this seemingly sense of powerlessness in the room among the very powerful people. And I trace it back to 2016,, a dinner that happens in New York called the Al Smith dinner.
And Al Smith, just to fill people in, Al Smith was the first Catholic nominee for president. He was the man who ran against Franklin Roosevelt back in the 1930s.
Exactly right. So in his memory, there's this dinner, it's a fundraiser. And Donald Trump tells a joke at this dinner. Again, he was running for president. He was his party's nominee, but he was not yet president, about Hillary Clinton being interviewed by the FBI about her private email server.
Now, I'm told Hillary went to confession before tonight's event. But the priest was having a hard time when he asked her about her sins. And she said she couldn't remember 39 times.
So tough joke, but but within bounds and within the spirit of the event. And then he followed it by saying, Hillary is so corrupt.
She got kicked off the Watergate commission. And some people booed, but mostly there was sort of a murmuring of confusion, a sort of, what is he talking about? And what, what I realized, in that moment, I was in the room is that he was telling a joke based on a debunked conspiracy theory that had bubbled up on the on the fringes of the internet. And that's why no one understood what the joke was about. Because for a joke to work, it's not just about everyone enjoying the punchline.
Everyone actually needs to understand the setup, they need to understand the premise. And the reason these dinners work, right, is because we share the same world, we see it differently, but we see the same world. And in that moment, Donald Trump was revealing, he was promising his joke on a world that was totally separate from the world in the room. And so I say at that moment, we kind of cleaved into this difference, where it's not that we don't share the same views, it's that we don't.
even occupy the same world. And this is actually a profound point that for humor to work, you have to have a shared body of facts to make jokes about. And so these dinners have changed, you're suggesting, in the Trump era, because there no longer is a single shared body of facts that everyone can riff on and joke about. Instead, there are Fox News facts for the right, MSNBC facts for the left, and there isn't enough common ground for people literally to come together and.
laugh. Exactly right, exactly right. I even went back and found one of the earlier recorded jokes from the 1800s that goes like this, when a person holds an argument with his neighbor on the opposite side of the street, why is there no chance of their agreeing? Because they argue from different premises. And it felt to me related when I found that, that we actually need to at least have an understood premise from which we start our arguments, and we just don't have that anymore.
And yes, it casts a pall over these dinners, it certainly casts a pall over democracies, but it casts a pall over these dinners, because these power brokers in the room, many of the dinners now have this feel of a lament that with all the power concentrated in these rooms, they're powerless to actually bring us back together. And related to this, because in.
a way, you're diagnosing as the cause of this Donald Trump and the sort of splitting of America in terms of occupying different knowledge silos, different information silos, but Trump himself has not gone to these dinners, he stayed away. A lot of people just put that down to him, being too thin skinned, he couldn't take a joke, he didn't like being mocked. Or do you think that explains it? Or do you think it is actually? his absence is one more symptom of this shift that you're describing?
I think it's both. Part of it is he certainly.
doesn't enjoy these evenings. He doesn't enjoy the jokes, he doesn't enjoy telling them, and he doesn't enjoy receiving them. But I really do think it's the most clear manifestation of the cleavage, which is, this isn't his world. He lives in a different world. Why should he enter a world that's uncomfortable to him?
He has built a very warm and friendly cocoon in a different reality.
Yeah. And in albeit through humor, he would be confronted with facts that he doesn't like, he prefers to live in the realm of the alternative facts.
We've got now, you know, another dinner coming in the White House Correspondents' Dinner in a very sensitive period. It's not only an election year, in which, you know, a lot of people think democracy itself is at stake, but wars going on in Ukraine and in the Middle East. It's not a particularly, you know, time for laughs. How do you think Joe Biden will approach the speech from that point of view? In other words, not just from the business of mocking himself, but from the even whether it feels appropriate to laugh at all and make jokes at a time like this?
Well, certainly, these dinners, there's a form to the remarks at these dinners. And there's some ratio of laughter to seriousness. And more than one speaker in the past has relied on the words of Abraham Lincoln, where he used to tell jokes at tense times. And if he didn't get a good response, he would say, literally, gentlemen, why don't you laugh? with this fearful strain that's upon us?
If we don't laugh, we should die. So I do find that even in the most serious moments, our leaders have found a way to both make us laugh and to justify that laughter. But I think that President Biden will try to use humor to do what humor has always done very well, which is help Lance boils right, help diminish concerns people have, whether that's about his age, whether it's using humor to deliver a message about his accomplishments. But when you write these speeches, as I have done in the past, the goal is not just to be funny, right? The goal is to actually have the audience leave with a message.
And so I think right now the Biden folks are thinking very hard about what that message should be. Yeah, they will be. They will be.
hard at work. Jeff, we always ask our guests on the podcast a what else? question, something a bit different. The big news this week was the long awaited passing of the aid package, military and humanitarian, to Ukraine, to Israel and to Taiwan. The Republicans, we've been reporting on the podcast for weeks, were holding that up, refusing to bring it to vote, even when it went through.
the Senate. Republicans in the House, including the sort of so-called Freedom Caucus, the pro-Trump MAGA wing, very reluctant to send any money through to Ukraine. It did in fact require Democratic votes to make sure that happened. Do you think the fact that the speaker, Mike Johnson, allowed it through, allowed it to a vote, the fact that Republicans in the end did let it come to a vote and be passed and now been signed by Joe Biden, arms should be on the way to Ukraine as we speak. Do you think that suggests a kind of change in strategy from congressional Republicans, even perhaps a recognition that on this one, they had lost the argument and they had to bow to the larger majority on Capitol Hill, who did indeed want to send aid to those countries?
I think certainly that's part of it. And it's wonderful that it happened. It's a shame that it took so long. Time and time again, commentators and others have said, this is the moment where the fever will finally break and we'll get bipartisanship and everything's going to get better. And that's been wrong every time.
However, I do think it's been put into stark relief. These bills passed by overwhelming margins, in most cases, Democratic and Republican majorities, Ukraine, a bare Republican minority, but still, and I think it brings into relief, why is it so hard to pass something that the vast majority of people want? And why is it that, while our society is still looks like a bell curve where most of us are clustered toward the middle, our politics looks like a barbell, with people clustered at the extremes. So I hope it's a realization that our politicians are maybe more divided than our society. And I hope it's a realization on Speaker Johnson's behalf.
I was joking with someone that there's something worse than falling on your own sword, which is falling on someone else's, that if, indeed, he thinks he may lose the house or he may lose the speakership, better to lose it in service of something. And so, in a way, if your own doom is foretold, it's liberating. And, ironically, in being liberated, he's showing a strength and conviction that actually is rallying people to his side, including in the Republican caucus. Bill Clinton used to joke that a lot of people would rather be with someone who's strong and wrong than weak and right. And for a long time in his speakership, Mike Johnson was weak and wrong.
Now, in this one moment, at least, he is strong and right. And that may ultimately strengthen.
his political position as well. Geoff Nisbaum, it's been a pleasure to speak with you. You will be, as we all will be, watching the jokes that are made over the weekend. You will be casting a professional eye over them. But thank you for talking with me for Politics Weekly America.
My pleasure.
And that is all from me for this week. Do make sure to listen to our sister podcast Today in Focus, where Michael Saffie is speaking to both the Guardian Central and Eastern Europe correspondent, Sean Walker, and our defence and security editor, Dan Sabbah, on whether Western aid can save Ukraine. But for now, it's goodbye. The producer was Josh and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj. I'm Jonathan Friedland.
Thanks, as always, for listening.
This is The Guardian.
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