White House Correspondents Insider

From transcript of “The O’Reilly Factor,” May 12, 2009.

All right. White House Correspondents’ Dinner. My man Miller here actually emceed an event for Bush the elder, and you were pretty tame. I mean, you didn’t go after anybody, did you?

MILLER: Oh, I was scared witless. I mean, you know, I was just a kid trying to make it, and it was Bush 41. I thought Wanda Sykes was kind of funny, for a girl. That’s a joke, Wanda. You know it. That’s all she’s doing today is explaining that. It was a joke. And the way I look at Wanda Sykes, man, I thought he was going to bring Reverend Wright in. So Wanda Sykes seems — that seems like a respite from the sturm und drang. I thought he might do Jeremiah down to do the gig. I thought Wanda was probably eager to please. I mean, you’re a black comedienne, and you’ve got a black president. I mean, can you imagine how much she needed to make him approve of her? So he went for it, and it looks like it worked. He was laughing his butt off, especially at the — you know, the…

O’REILLY: It all went south. Taken from somebody who was there in the front row, and I was. It all went south in the last 10 minutes. The first 15 minutes were fine. But then she got mean. And here’s my question to you. The remarks about Limbaugh, about Sarah Palin, Cheney to some extent — that wasn’t over the top — were mean. And then they flashed to Obama laughing at the meanness. I don’t think that does him any good there, Dennis.

MILLER: Well, listen. Cheney thrives on that stuff. It’s like Dennis Hopper with the mask in “Blue Velvet.” He just eats that stuff up. But I would say this. I don’t think she was a pro that night. You know, a comedian’s judged by somebody whether they’re a pro or a non-pro. I don’t know how funny or funny it wasn’t. But I do know it wasn’t pro, because at some point you get hired, and she didn’t fill the requisite out for what they needed. They needed it to be edgy but to not make it feel weird. [Read more…]

Wanda Sykes told the WHCInsider Saturday night that she was told not to use the F or N words, but was her comedy routine too tough on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others?

“Lost in the frenzy is the more important matter of our thin-skinned intolerance and our reflexive lurch to take offense. We might remind ourselves that it’s always the fanatics who can’t take a joke”, from the last line of Kathleen Parker’s, Washington Post column today.

Why Is That Man Smiling?

by Kathleen Parker (Washington Post)

Which is why we probably shouldn’t quarterback a comedian over coffee when she was performing for a crowd primed on cocktails.

That reasonable rule seems not to apply, however, when the venue is the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and one of the revelers happens to be the president of the United States. Whether he laughs, smiles or frowns carries political freight far beyond the moment.

Washington buzz lately has become a buzz saw.

In the days since the correspondents’ dinner, reaction to Barack Obama’s reaction to Wanda Sykes’s one-liners has resembled a confederacy of scolds. What dreary, sensitive wretches we’ve become.

Do I think Sykes was a monument to hilarity? No, but she was funny much of the time. Do I think her now-infamous Rush Limbaugh jokes were over the top? Yeah. That’s a comedian for you. Do I think her performance — and Obama’s apparent amusement — marks the decline of civilization? This is hardly a new development.

I do think we take ourselves far too seriously — and literally.

For those who’ve somehow managed to avoid the controversy, Sykes joked that Limbaugh, whom she compared to Osama bin Laden, might have been the 20th hijacker, but was “just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight.” She also suggested that Rush might be guilty of treason for hoping Obama’s policies fail.

In a final flourish, she said: “Rush Limbaugh, ‘I hope the country fails’ — I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a waterboarding, that’s what he needs.”

Ho-ho-ho. The audience did not, in fact, roar with laughter, at least not compared to other jokes during the evening. From where I sat, most who laughed were reacting to the outrageousness of the “joke.” Even Sykes acknowledged that she’d gone too far, but noted that we’d be talking about it later. She got that part right. [Read more…]