An Argument FOR continuing the WH Correspondents’ Dinner — Because the Nazis weren’t funny
Michelle Wolf’s scathing performance at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner has provoked the usual calls for this event to be discontinued. The argument is that it embodies the worst of DC-insiderism, a bunch of journalists and politicians sitting around and laughing with each other and, by implication, at the rest of us for what suckers we are to accept the manufactured reality these two groups of entitled professionals have supposedly curated for us. There’s a modicum of truth to that critique, but I think a case can be made that the Correspondents’ Dinner serves an important social and political function.
Humor plays an important role in a diverse political culture aspiring toward democracy. It’s not a coincidence that humorists (esp. the ones who do social commentary) have disproportionately come from non-dominant social locations — think of the long list of great American humorists who have been Jewish, African-American, women, gay, working class, etc. Humor enables a society to engage with a tension-ridden power dynamic honestly, while not allowing that dynamic to unravel the society. The laughter releases some of that tension in a collective moment of catharsis.
The tension on display at the Correspondents’ Dinner is a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things, but it’s worth continuing to laugh about it. The Correspondents’ Dinner dramatizes the tension that emerges when one set of humans (journalists) need to have a close but critical (if not adversarial) relationship to another set of humans (politicians). It is unavoidable that these journalists and politicians, working cheek by jowl day in and day out, will form private, emotional bonds with each other that will make it challenging for them to play their respective, public roles with detachment.
We will never design a system of journalism that can avoid such a situation. All we can do is try our best to be aware of the situation and to mitigate its potential to undermine both the democratic political process and journalistic integrity. And so the journalists and politicians gather once a year to laugh about the absurdity of the situation they are in…as a way to make the tensions visible to each other and to relieve some of those tensions by laughing together.
The alternatives are far worse.
Either a) the politicians entirely wall themselves off from the journalists and we citizens get even less insight into what’s happening in DC, or b) the journalists and politicians delude the world and themselves into believing that their personal connections have zero impact on the way the press covers politics. There are many countries around the world in which Michelle Wolf would risk imprisonment or more subtle political harm for doing what she did last night — Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia to name just a few. Those countries include many that our current Administration and the MAGA movement feels pretty warmly about.
Citizens will always tell jokes about people in power, often quite mean ones. This happens even in the most totalitarian of regimes, only it happens secretly and quietly. As long we can keep telling jokes and laughing with each other in public without legal repercussions, we’ve got a democratic political culture. But if we can no longer occupy that space of tense laughter together, then the chances we can do other difficult things together (like politics) becomes even less likely.