Tonight was the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, when America celebrates its most teeth-grittingest night of blazing-tepid comedy. Yes, the annual tradition that sees Washington D.C.’s funniest people prove that depressing reality in dismal detail, while a paid comedian prepares themselves to be compared unfavorably to Stephen Colbert, has come and gone again, producing upwards of two whole big laughs in the entire process.
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As people who watched the event—possibly because they were being paid to, on the off, and ultimately unfounded, chance that Colin Jost would say more than one funny or newsworthy thing—will know, it was full, as always, of wholesome stuff before getting to the main event. Journalists calling out for their imprisoned friends to be released; scholarship kids shining big smiles; impressionist Matt Friend making a joke about the guy who self-immolated outside Donald Trump’s New York trial. (Classy!) But people were, presumably, mostly watching for the traditional comedy sets that wrap up the night: A joke-heavy speech from the President, and then a follow-up from professionally funny person Jost.
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Uncharacteristically, though, Biden got the biggest laugh of the night, to our minds. Not one of his many digs at Trump—although pointing out that one of the differences between them was that “My vice president actually endorses me” wasn’t bad. No, what caught us was a surprisingly sharp “Lauren Boebert caught vaping and handjob-ing at Beetlejuice” reference, noting that Congress can’t just be “political theater,” because “they’d have thrown out Lauren Boebert a long time ago.” Kudos to whichever White House staffer gave, but did not explain, that particular gag to the president.
Jost, meanwhile, seemed distinctly out of his element without a desk (or Michael Che) to hide behind, fielding tons of jokes about his far-more-famous wife (who was in attendance) and swinging weakly at print journalists. (Correcting himself, at one point, after addressing the New York Times as “Wordle.”) Working his way through the usual array of “Biden is old” jokes, he got off only a handful of genuinely cutting lines. (“Like many of you here tonight,” he noted at one point, “I pretend to do news on TV.”) His best material was lobbed at the familiar, very mockable target of Trump, with Jost’s biggest line of the night coming when he stated that every court room sketch of Trump at his current trial looks “Like The Grinch had sex with The Lorax.”
Mostly, though, Jost’s material was just toothless, despite a single reference to “dangerous geopolitical hot spots like Columbia University.” If the big appeal of the White House Correspondents Dinner is in seeing a comedian actually speak a little truth to power, Jost mostly passed the buck, instead peddling middle of the road material before ending his whole speech on a slightly mawkish, “I love my grandpa” note. We’d love to tell you it was hilarious, because it’d mean we’d have spent the last half hour of our lives laughing, instead of jotting down about a dozen half-smiles’ worth of jokes. But outside of one other line, comparing Obama and Biden’s first terms—“Obama got Bin Laden, you got O.J.!”—it was just sort of a waste of everyone involved’s presumably very expensive time.