The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a pretty weird and peculiarly American concept. High-ranking members of the sitting administration, usually including the US President, put on their tuxedos, put aside their natural enmity and sit down to have dinner in a spirit of forced bonhomie with the Washington press corps.
Richard Nixon called the event “the worst of its type that I have ever attended” and described the attendees as “a drunken group, crude, and terribly cruel”. I don’t know what he expected from a collection of working journalists on a night off and with access to a free bar, but for 105 years, surviving wars, depressions, impeachments, scandals and Covid, the correspondents’ dinner has been an annual occasion in America’s political calendar.
Never before, however, has it been interrupted by a gunman attempting to enter the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, as it was on Friday night. Now, I am well aware that what I am about to discuss is not the most noteworthy aspect of what was potentially a world-changing incident, but, at the time that gunshots were heard (with Trump and his cabinet the apparent targets), the stage belonged to the evening’s entertainer, a mind-reader called Oz The Mentalist.
And why is this significant? Traditionally, a well-known comedian or satirist provides the cabaret act. In the past, such giants of the comedy and entertainment world as Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase and Jay Leno have performed at the dinner, and Presidents have taken some gentle mickey-taking in good part, making themselves, in turn, look more human, relatable and personable.
Occasionally, the President himself turns joker, and so it was in 2011 that Barack Obama took the microphone to roast the then Apprentice host, Donald Trump. In the week that Obama’s birth certificate had been made public, the President said: “No one is happier to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
Trump was seen in the audience, definitely not joining in the laughter, and some people ascribe his running for President in 2016 to his desire not to be the butt of the joke any longer – he himself has denied it. Either way, Trump did not attend the correspondents’ dinner during his entire first Presidency, or indeed last year’s event, and his presence this time round, among representatives of the mainstream media he so abhors, was, we can assume, secured by the booking of Oz The Mentalist rather than one of America’s sharp-tongued comedians or fearless late-night satirists.
So has Donald Trump’s America reached a post-comedy moment? Is reality beyond satire? When you have a President who posts a picture of himself as Jesus, healing the infirm, or who says the Pope “isn’t doing a very good job”, or who makes countless other solecisms, it’s quite difficult to work up a sketch that might lampoon him. There are no jokes to be made any more. Comedy has become redundant.
And so it falls to Oz The Mentalist to fill the void. This is a man whose career has been built on making audiences believe things on the strength of confident presentation rather than inconvenient evidence. How appropriate a figure, you may say, for these Trumpian days.
But there is more to it than that. The main question raised by this event is: Can power take a joke? And throughout its history over more than a century, the answer was a resounding yes. However, these are different times. Not exactly more serious, but more self-reverential, more peculiar, and less likely, naturally, to raise a laugh.
Trump, fresh from his brush with death, wants the dinner to be rescheduled within the next month, presumably so Oz The Mentalist can finish his mind-bending routine – neatly illustrating the point that when real life couldn’t get any weirder, the joke is on us.
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