The point Kevin raises is worth exploring.
If Sanders had opted to speak at the dinner, either before or after Wolf (I
have no idea if this was even on the table, so this is very hypothetical),
would the criticism/outrage be muted? I don't know how funny she could be in
this setting, as President Obama set a high bar.
Comparing these year-to-year always seems apples to oranges, but this is the
second one that the Cheeto-in-Chief skipped. I don't remember much outrage
from last year's remarks by Hasan Minhaj. But I don't know how much of this
difference can be attributed to there being no administration representatives
in the room or from the different reception a female comedian can get in a room
- any room - compared to her male peers.
Maybe the collective missing the point on Wolf's specific jokes is of a kind
with the reaction to some of Larry Wilmore's material from 2016? Hearing what
you want to hear rather than really listening (which is not easy to do in that
crappy hotel ballroom).
David
On Sunday, April 29, 2018, 3:55:40 PM EDT, Kevin M.
<[email protected]> wrote:
The reason it comes across as more mean spirited than a traditional roast is
the focus of the roast refuses to participate. Traditionally, the person being
roasted gets the last word. Trump is too cowardly to lob insults to anybody's
face, so the dinner has become one-sided. If he attended, he could speak out in
person (at the risk of sounding old-school sexist... that’s what a real man
would do), but the coward knows he’d be outnumbered and outwitted, so he makes
up the pretense that the dinner is somehow beneath him (he puts ketchup on
steak... no dinner is beneath him).
As much as the topical humor isn’t for me, I recognize the value of it in pop
culture. Just because the bully won’t play in the sandbox is no reason to
dismantle the sandbox.
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