The Best Tweets from Comedians about Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner Roast

By Garrett Martin  |  April 30, 2018 | 1:30pm
Photo courtesy of Getty Images
Comedy Features Michelle Wolf
The Best Tweets from Comedians about Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner Roast

It’s been two days since Michelle Wolf told some fact-based jokes about Trump, his administration and the media at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and for some reason people are still talking about it. (They should be talking about how the entire dinner is terrible depressing bullshit that shows just how fundamentally broken the media in America is, of course.) Many in the mainstream media blasted Wolf over her set, pretty much because the media hates being reminded of how terrible a job they’ve been doing this century (and especially in the Trump era). Conservatives act like they’re incensed over Wolf’s supposed hatred and intolerance, but in reality are just being their regular disingenuous, hypocritical, bad acting selves, looking for anything that they can act like victims about while moving the national conversation away from legitimate issues. For all their talk about political correctness killing comedy and complaints about “virtue signalling” “snowflakes” who need safe spaces, the right never misses any opportunity to complain about jokes made at their expense.

In response to the (largely fake) outrage over Wolf doing exactly what she was hired to do, many comedians have taken to Twitter to defend her performance and mock the performative anger of Wolf’s critics. Most notable comedians seem to agree that Wolf did a great job of speaking truth to power, and that the biggest complaints about her are coming from people who either want to silence criticism of Trump and his minions, or from members of the media who are angry that Wolf took them to task for their complicity in Trump’s election.

And then there are the tweets from comedians who have firmly embraced the right-wing and/or Trump, two of whom were major names in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Former SNL fake newsman and HBO talk show host Dennis Miller called Wolf “a horrid human being” and promised to have “a few brutally mean jokes about her by Wednesday.” Other comedians don’t know what’s more laughable—that it’ll take Miller four days (by his own admission!) to come up with some quality zingers, or the thought that the sucking humor void that is Miller could somehow write any good jokes in the year 2018. Roseanne Barr, who has revealed herself to be a full-fledged Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist on her Twitter account, responded by making up a “first rule of comedy” that no other comedian has ever heard of and that basically says that comedians should only punch down.

Below are some of the funniest and most passionate responses to Wolf’s speech, the absurd reaction to it from the right and the media, and a few digs at Miller and Barr for good measure. And we promise you this will be the last time we write about this thing in our humble little comedy section.

Before you hop into it, though, here’s a Twitter thread from Kathy Griffin that’s gotten a lot of praise since this whole thing started. We’ve embedded a key tweet below, but if you’re looking for what’s probably the definitive response to Wolf’s set from a comedian’s perspective, you might want to go read the whole thread.

 
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