White House Correspondents’ Dinner 2015: Cecily Strong jokes about Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, more

Following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner performance of President Barack Obama, we then turned to the host of the hour in Cecily Strong. The “Saturday Night Live” cast member took to the stage in an effort to entertain what is a very difficult room. This is notoriously one of the hardest gigs for any comedian out there. These people are grumpy, often tired, and really don’t want to laugh at anything some outsider has to say. They really weren’t too kind to Joel McHale last year.

For the most part, we feel like she gave a winning performance here, mostly because she brought some great jokes and also a unique perspective to the mix, talking about women’s issues in a venue that often ignores them. The best part of this (at least for us) was her forcing the media to pledge not to talk about Hillary Clinton’s appearance the entire campaign.

Away from that, some of her jokes included Hobby Lobby’s recent policies, how Ted Cruz’s background makes him the perfect candidate for Hillary’s campaign video, and how President Obama’s hair is now so white that it would not get in any trouble with the police.

The worst part of Strong’s speech here was her entire bit about Aaron Schock, the Congressman who had quite an homage to “Downton Abbey” in his office. This was a long bit about Instagram, and for the most part it failed to really hit. After a while, we just felt a little uncomfortable for her.

Overall, though, Cecily did get many big laughs during her time on the stage, and above all she was edgy. We cannot ask for much more.

To get some other news related to the dinner tonight, head over to the link here for our take on the President Obama portion of the evening. Also, you can sign up now to get some other TV updates on all we cover via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: C-SPAN.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkgsYFRdWAE