The ladies of ABC's The View unanimously defended liberal comedian Michelle Wolf's White House Correspondents Dinner routine on Monday. Whoopi Goldberg said there was a "brutal backlash" and calls for an end to the dinner. Joy Behar said "We were laughing our heads off here." Goldberg said "I chuckled a lot."
Whoopi played "funny" jokes like "You guys got stop putting Kellyanne on your shows! All she does is lie! It's like that old saying, 'If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree?' I'm not suggesting she gets hurt. Just stuck."
Sara Haines declared "The comedian did her job! She is there to come and push the envelope. That's what comedians do."
Sunny Hostin said she was in the room with Wolf.
SUNNY HOSTIN: People were laughing in the room....I was laughing, I was sitting with some of my CNN friends, Don Lemon and I were cackling during a lot of it. And I agree with you, Sara, I think in many respects, comedy's supposed to be subversive, it's supposed to push the envelope. If you read it or see it, everything she said is based on truth, and facts.
JOY BEHAR: That's what they don't like.
HOSTIN: And perhaps that's not what they like.
She later added "They're talking about vulgarity in the administration, and how can you work for Trump and get offended by vulgarity?"
None of the View crew was forced to evaluate just how "subversive" and "envelope-pushing" the comedians were when Obama was president. Which media-hired comedian trashed Obama, or spokesmen like Jay Carney and Josh Earnest?
Instead, the Obama era began in 2009, when they picked Wanda Sykes, whose idea of envelope-pushing was saying of Rush Limbaugh "I hope his kidneys fail, how 'bout that? Needs a little waterboarding, that's what he needs." It ended in 2016, when they picked Larry Wilmore, who uncorked nine incredibly lame jokes referring to Ted Cruz as the “Zodiac Killer” and ended with by saluting the president: “Yo, Barry. You did it, my n*gga!” The press lauded Obama as hilarious that year, and almost totally ignored Wilmore.
In 2012, the WHCA picked.....Louis CK. Luckily for them, Brent Bozell sent a letter of protest, and Greta Van Susteren echoed the objections, and the comedian withdrew, long before #MeToo.
Joy Behar complained, “I feel as though comedians are becoming an endangered species right now. There's something that I call the Comedy Removal Services out there. You know, like some kind of organization going on that wants to suck all the laughs out of our lives and just leave us with Donald Trump, who by the way called women fat pigs. As my father used to say people who live in glass houses should dress in the cellar.”
The only note of dissent came from Ana Navarro, who just said that in general, "I hate roasts" and finds them all in bad taste. But after an ad break, Navarro added: "I can't bring myself to hold a comedian for one night to a higher standard than we hold the President of the United States for his entire term!"
