Michelle Wolf Takes Us All Down With Her

An empty box of tampons for Michelle Wolf, whose awful performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner managed to make people on all sides of the aisle feel sorry for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Ivanka Trump and even Kellyanne Conway.

There's an art to good comedy and satire, and this woefully unseasoned talent has yet to develop hers. Stephen Colbert managed to skewer every one of the George W. Bush administration's juicy targets with finesse and devastating truth. Not so Michelle Wolf. Her "pussy" jokes were too literal, her fornication cracks too sophomoric, and her remarks about the torrent of lies told by senior White House staff members, including those on the dais and in the room, were just too mean and crude. She even had the gracelessness to make a "joke" about the Southwest Airlines engine failure that cost a woman her life last week.

I blame the WHCA itself for hiring someone so green and unseasoned for this extremely high profile and delicate gig. Humor and satire are critical tools for responding to the political nightmare we're living through, but their selection process of late is decidedly "B" list. Maybe the better comedians have ruled out putting themselves through the ordeal of stepping up to this somewhat thankless challenge. But if you're going to pluck someone out of relative obscurity, help her or him out with some wise counsel and connections to good writers. We're living in a time when brilliant comedy about Trump & Co. is appearing nightly on at least four networks. There is simply no excuse for a comedy set weeks in the making to be as unfunny and offensive as Wolf's was last night.

I've read comments about Wolf's performance from Trump opponents who say to the critics, "boo hoo, you get what you deserve." But what about what WE on the left and in the center deserve? We should be basking in the glow today of smart, sophisticated, dead-on take-downs of every shameless opportunist and hustler in the Trump and White House orbit. Instead we're embarrassed and bruised.

For the most part, this episode will be forgotten by the end of the week, to the extent it made much of an impression at all. But it's still a missed opportunity and an egregious failure by people who should know a lot better.