Forgetting Sarah Palin at the White House Correspondents Dinner

Every year it’s the same old thing: the White House Press Corps holds a gala dinner, invites a ton of people that have no connection to the press or the White House and then proceeds to yuck it up with a comedian or two, if the president (whomever that might be) has a decent sense of humor.

And yet it’s often entertaining. They, and by “they” I mean C-Span, even cover the Red Carpet arrivals of all the famous and semi-famous people that are invited. Press dignitaries who do not belong to the White House Press Corps — and never were members — are there as well, along with editors, copy editors, news and editorial columnists, photographers, both still and video and all manner of press-related individuals who make a living in the press: in print, online, radio and television.

And then there are the celebrities, the Hollywood crowd. Actors and actresses, directors and producers; some that are three of the four; singers, dancers and ballroom romancers; they’re all there at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the hottest must attend event in the world. This is bigger than the effin’ Oscars. No lie.

“That can’t be true! It’s broadcast on C-Span, for god’s sake!” There’s a reason for that: C-Span is a non-partisan entity unaffiliated with any of the broadcast networks or the multinational — global — media conglomerates that own and control the news we read, view or listen to, in print, online, over the radio or television.

Here’s the other reason, which may be the more important of the two — and this is why the Big Networks really don’t want to invest in a WHCD broadcast deal — the part that is worth broadcasting, outside of the red carpet entrance, only lasts about an hour. So, you have this program that will feature about an hour’s worth of red carpet entrances … and then it goes dark for about another hour because the thousands of people in the dinner are piling ladles full of over-priced food in their gobbers. After that we get maybe an hour’s worth of comedic entertainment, some of which can be painfully unfunny, embarrassingly inappropriate and woefully amateurish. There’s really not enough time to exploit for commercials.

So, it goes to C-Span, which is only too happy to air it, considering it’s a big step up from watching Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell duke it out in the well of the U.S. Senate and by golly, it can be damn entertaining — especially the red carpet part when the men and women of C-Span can go gaga over the Hollywood celebrities.

The cable news networks carry it because, what the hell, it’s a Saturday Night and what have they got on the weekend? The Friday dump? MSNBC has “Lock-Up” and “Caught On Camera,” both of which get played to death until “Meet the Press” gets its replay at 11 p.m. Sunday Night and what the hell, the men and women that aren’t actually invited to get a meal in the deal get to go and cover it as if it’s an actual news event. Complete with a red carpet portion that lets them “oo” and “ah” over the Hollywood celebrities that are invited.

Then there are the news junkies that go absolutely batshit crazy if they miss even one minute of coverage of any part of it — including the red carpet because, let’s be honest ya’ll, we get all gaga over the Hollywood celebrities walking the red carpet and get spotted out during the entertainment portion of the night.

It takes a certain type of news junkie to not only want to watch the entirety of the White House Correspondents Dinner, from the moment the red carpet coverage starts, to the hour or so of second and third tier pundits talking about the red carpet coverage and what took place in WHCD’s of the past; comparing this comedian to that one and this president’s funny bone to his predecessor and then the actual entertainment that starts with a speech by the president of the White House Correspondents Association — yeah, they have an association — and then the president does his shtick followed by the only person paid to be there, the comedian.

To want to watch that and then to know what the hell the president and comedian are talking about, i.e. the inside jokes, yeah, you have to be a serious news junkie to spend your Saturday Night popping popcorn in anticipation of watching the White House Correspondents Dinner. If you know someone like that, you wonder just how boring a life does that person lead?

It’s sort of like nerds, real nerds, not pseudo-nerds who call themselves nerds because they play video games and sometimes go to Comic-Con. You know real nerds on Facebook for instance because they circulate math and physics “jokes” that only math and science nerds get because they have to do with math and physics things that only nerds can understand.

Same thing with news junkies. If you know someone that laughs when the president and the comedian bust jokes about cable news broadcasters, like, “the only reason Hardball with Chris Matthews has commercials is so the cameramen can wipe the spittle off the cameras,” that person is a hopeless news junkies.

And he or she watched the White House Correspondents Dinner at least three times because it gets replayed several times on C-Span — from start to finish — as well as the two news networks and FoxNews.

So that was my weekend.

We news junkies know why the joke about Chris Matthews getting spittle on the camera is funny. We know what the president’s joke about having a drink with Mitch McConnell is all about — and I ain’t fixin’ to explain it here.

The ubiquitous “They” call the WHCD “Nerd Prom.” And it is, except these aren’t the math and science nerds, although there are usually a few of them in attendance. These nerds are the ones who can name the capitals of all 50 states and the territories without so much as a second to think about it. They probably know all the state flowers and birds too and they can tell you the capitals of the provinces in Canada.

They can give you an economic rundown for each state and every major metropolitan center with a population over 250,000; they can tell us the margin of victory in every presidential election — ever! And they can recite the exact history of the House of Representatives, including all the Speakers and how long each served, as well as the greatest Congressmen to ever hold court in the Lower Chamber of Congress. And of course they can (and often do) let us know the same about the U.S. Senate.

They are nerds just as much as math and science nerds, although the math and science wizzes don’t like to share their title with anyone that isn’t a math and science nerd. It’s an ego thing. Who knew nerds were prideful?

These are the nerds who got all “A’s” in history, civics and geography and took advanced classes in political science plus they were on the debate team and represented their schools at all the speech and debate competitions because these are type of people who commit to memory all that minutiae that the rest of us find absolutely useless in daily living.

Nerd Prom? You bet. The only saving grace for the event are the A-list Hollywood celebrities that are invited, as well as special guests like people who did heroic things or were otherwise spotlighted in the news. Like that one year Joe the (now forgotten) Plumber was invited.

For people like me the White House Correspondence Dinner is “Must See” TV.  Truly. It’s bigger than the Oscars and for the past four years it’s been relatively entertaining.

President Obama is usually a pretty funny guy and he likes attending the event. Not all presidents enjoy it. George W. Bush (43) didn’t really care for it, but he played along as best as he could. I give him a “B” for effort, which is a high grade compared to his transcripts from Yale.

But President Obama, he likes it and it shows. In 2011 while the men of Seal Team 6 were getting ready to kill Usama bin Laden, the president was in the Grand Ballroom of the D.C. Hilton killing it with jokes about his rivals, in particular Donald Trump.

He wasn’t quite so funny in 2012. President Obama got too nerdy with his jokes, making them like the wordy jokes from actual nerds we read on Facebook. People, even nerds, want one-liners in live events and the president is pretty good with his one-liners; he knows how to tell a joke. So in 2013 the president was back to telling one-liners. And he killed. If the GOP in Congress wants to reach out to minorities … the president raised his hand. They should start with him. Or, his take on why he hasn’t been on the cover of a magazine lately: “I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist I used to be.”

Comedians … well the Association has to be particular with that selection. They can’t hire someone who the general public thinks is hilarious because the whole point of the event is to roast the president, his fellow politicians and the media — but not too harshly. Which is why we will most likely never see Chris Rock and Louis Black headline the event. Well that and their propensity for dropping F-bombs.

And ever since Stephen Colbert skewered President Bush and the White House Press Corps at the 2006 dinner, the Association has taken great pains to make sure they got a comedian who wasn’t too offensive. Colbert, as his Comedy Central character, didn’t create comedy as much as he pilloried all those in attendance with his dead-on satire. Colbert wasn’t really trying to make people laugh, he wanted everyone in that room to squirm and so they did. Even the guests didn’t laugh for fear of offending their hosts.

Since then the comedians have been friendlier to host Association and the president. In 2009 they had Wanda Sykes. She killed it. In 2011 Seth Myers. He killed it, especially with his one big dig at Donald Trump. He, his wife (or maybe it was a girlfriend, I don’t remember) and his entourage were the only people squirming. He chided President Obama for not being the president we expected when he campaigned and we voted for him in 2008; he slammed his own network, NBC, repeatedly. Even more so than FoxNews.

In the past seven years Seth Myers just might be the best headliner to appear at the WHCD.

This year the headliner was Conan O’Brien. He took a shot from the president, who spoke before O’Brien. That is the WHCD custom: first the most powerful person in the world and then the comedian. The president said, “I want to give a shout out to our headliner, Conan O’Brien. When the correspondence association were considering Conan for this gig they were faced with the age-old dilemma: do you offer it to him now or wait five years and give it to Jimmy Fallon?”

That was funny, but the assembled crowd, thought it was too low a blow. Naah, Conan knows he’s still a punchline on late night TV. And of course you have to know the story behind Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon and NBC. O’Brien replaced Jay Leno as the host of the Tonight Show for about five minutes — and then was yanked out of the slot and left to dangle in the wind.

O’Brien now has a late night show on TBS four nights a week — it’s true, I see it in the channel guide when I’m surfing through the channels. And Jimmy Fallon is being groomed to replace Leno on the Tonight Show.

Many people said the president was funnier than O’Brien, which is almost true. O’Brien’s bit started slow but eventually had the attendees laughing.

But it wasn’t the dinner itself that got me thinking about writing something on the WHCD. Here it is, 2,000 words into this and I haven’t even mentioned what got me started. For all of you that might be behind the times a little electronically, one thing you have to do when watching something like the WHCD is also be connected to your Twitter account.

What? You don’t have a Twitter account? You might as well stop reading now ’cause this is over for you. What? You stopped reading after the second paragraph?

Anyway, what got me was this Tweet from the quitter, Sarah Palin: “That ‪#WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a ‪#nerdprom.”

Well, Mrs. Half-term governor, Every now and then the rest of us in America throw parties too so it’s not like the White House Press Corps is out of step with the nation. And, I might add, they’ve been doing it for nearly 100 years, regardless of who occupied the Oval Office. And let’s be clear, quitter: you ain’t exactly working either.

And that was basically the tone of the Tweets responding to the quitter’s Tweet. It’s linked HERE if you want to read it.

Once again Sarah Palin was left off the invite list. Not even her former employers at FoxNews had a place at the table for Palin. Hell, I don’t recall either the president or O’Brien making any jokes about Sarah Palin. Man, that’s gotta hurt: so irrelevant they don’t even make you the butt of any jokes at the White House Correspondents dinner!

So what does she do? She calls all those people attending “assclowns.” What few followers she has left loved it.  The rest of America though, the 99 percent, found it quite entertaining.

And to think just two months ago I thought Sarah Palin was finished. Well she is politically, but she still can command attention on Twitter. Maybe she can win an award for “Funniest Unintentionally Funny Twitter Account.”

Or maybe she’ll finally get the point: she just isn’t important anymore.

Next year we’ll have another White House Correspondents Dinner and you can bet I’ll be watching, the red carpet too because nothing says lonely news junkie nerd like watching the WHCD on a Saturday Night. Yeah that’s right math and science whizzes, I’m a nerd — a news junkie nerd. Deal with it.

Peace. Out.