I just watched the speech/act Hasan Minhaj performed at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and I've embedded a video of it below. I'm sure a lot of folks wouldn't like it but I thought it was a gutsy, on-point effort that went over about as well as anything could in that room. He was not nice to a lot of those in the audience and even not-nicer to that Chief Exec who was conspicuous in his absence. But he had some really sharp, clever lines.
That is a very tough gig, maybe the toughest in all of comedy. Those who turn out to dinner and mingle are there to shmooze and be seen, not to be the target of barbs from the rostrum. It's also a situation where the performer has to go out in front of the world with material that is wholly untested on the intended sort of audience. I mean, it's not like there's a comedy club somewhere in which one can "break it in"before a similar assemblage and filter out the lines that get tepid responses.
Minhaj is a brave man with (mostly) strong material. A few times, you could see on this face that he was thinking "Wish I'd cut that last one" but he kept soldiering on and most of it paid off. I won't quote any of his best lines because many of you will now be clicking and watching.
Well, I'll quote one: At the outset, he said "Welcome to the series finale of the White House Correspondents' Dinner" and I thought to myself, "Oh, I hope so." I've always found these to be phony affairs with reporters and journalists rubbing elbows with the President — whoever it is at the moment — instead of holding his feet to the fire. What I saw of the dinner before Minhaj got to the microphone made me wonder if everything wrong with this event can't be solved merely by having the president not be there.
Take him and his loyal staff out of the equation and it's a very different event. Suddenly, the reporters are the most important ones in the hall and you don't have as much phony, feigned respect on the premises. So now I'm thinking that the greatest achievements of Trump's first 100 days is that he may have shown the White House Correspondents Association how to do these events right: Don't invite the guy in the Oval Office.
It's not much but it's something. Here's the speech…