Late-night comedians unanimously rallied around Michelle Wolf Monday night following backlash to her Saturday night performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
Decried as “filthy” and “disgraceful” by the president, who wasn’t in attendance for the second year in a row, some members of the media said parts of Wolf’s set “crossed a line. The White House Correspondents’ Association even issued a mea culpa following the backlash, saying the “entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of” the dinner’s mission.
None of this — from the president’s disparaging remarks to the WHCA’s half-apology — sat well with Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel or Trevor Noah.
“Hire a juggler next year,” Kimmel scathingly wrote on Twitter. “Michelle Wolf was FUNNY.”
“When you call her filthy, you are right,” Meyers, who hosted the dinner in 2011, said on his program Monday night. “She is filthy and she is mean, which is what we love about her because those are wonderful qualities for a comedian and terrible qualities for free world leaders.”
Teasing the comedian’s forthcoming Netflix show, Meyers added that Wolf wouldn’t “waste any time trying to decide when it is or isn’t proper to make fun of people in power who lie to us on a daily basis.”
Stephen Colbert had strong words for the WHCA specifically, telling them to “grow a pair.”
“Of whatever you want. A pair of whatever you want. This was a roast, and you’re the ones who hired Michelle Wolf,” Colbert, who faced backlash after hosting the 2006 Correspondents’ Dinner, said. “You’re telling me you couldn’t spend 90 seconds on YouTube to find out what her act was like?”
Over on the Daily Show, where Wolf recently worked as a correspondent, Trevor Noah replied specifically to those who thought Wolf went too far with joking about makeup used by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Creating a montage of all the times President Trump has made disparaging comments about women, Noah said: “It’s not funny because Michelle should have had the decency to not comment on women’s appearances in any way, shape or form. She’s a comedian for God’s sake, not the president.”
Take a look at the clips below.
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