Everybody Seemed Pretty Mad at Larry Wilmore at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

By Aimée Lutkin  |  May 1, 2016 | 6:00pm
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Humor is subjective. Most of these jokes made me laugh. The audience’s reactions throughout made me cringe.

I haven’t watched that many WHCD speeches in their entirety, aside from Stephen Colbert’s famous 2006 roast of George Bush. This, too, is a roast presented to a crowd of people with no sense of humor, and directed in part at a president who is far, far more beloved. Many of Wilmore’s jokes were also about race, and every single one was followed by a wave of sound from a largely white audience that couldn’t really qualify as laughter. Yet, he soldiered on. I salute you, Larry Wilmore.


Here are some of the jokes that got the most groans and boos:

To Obama: “I saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors. That was cool. You know, it kind of makes sense too, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from long distances.”
“MSNBC is here tonight. Yep, which actually now stands for ‘Missing a Significant Number of Black Correspondents’. . . MSNBC got rid of so many black people, I thought Boko Haram was running that network.”
“The treasury promised to put Harriet Tubman’s face on the 20 dollar bill…but now we have to wait until 2030… Women haven’t been this deceived by a bill since Cosby. [Boos] Oh, like I did it.”
“I am confused with Bernie Sanders’s stance on guns. He seems to be anti-gun everywhere except Vermont. Bernie doesn’t care who gets a gun in Vermont. There are no black people in Vermont.”
HUGE boo, don’t come for Kelly Ripa:
“Hillary [Clinton] was flustered when a Black Lives Matter protester challenged her. I haven’t seen a white lady that upset over being blindsided by a black person since Kelly Ripa.”
“I just got a note from the president saying that if you want another drink you should order it now because the bar will be closing down. Of course, he said the same thing about Guantanamo so you have at least another eight years.”

“Bernie Sanders so old his first campaign slogan was ‘fire,’” got a big laugh, and he also won them back with an extended bit about Ted Cruz being the Zodiac Killer. Wilmore wound it down with a sincere reflection on what it has meant to him to see a black man become president of the United States. Then:

#HotTake loved him, would watch again 10/10

Image via Washington Post.

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