Samantha Bee staging own version of White House Correspondents’ Dinner for TBS
Typically, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is one of the strangest, and funniest, events of the entire year. It’s a chance to see comedy and politics be combined in a way that is both incredibly awkward and incredibly funny. There have been some disasters and plenty of polarizing performances, but this is still an event where you get to see great routines that you don’t get anywhere else.
As for how this is going to happen in a Donald Trump administration, that remains unclear given that he has such a testy relationship with both Hollywood and the press, otherwise known as the two pillars of the Dinner. We could easily envision a scenario where he just doesn’t attend it, but we would assume that the event will still go on. Even if it doesn’t for some crazy reason, “Full Frontal” host Samantha Bee is planning her own event called Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is also going to take place the night of the event on April 29 in Washington DC. It will air on TBS, and other comedy guests are slated to appear but are not announced as of yet.
In speaking to the New York Times (clearly not one of Trump’s favorite publications these days), Bee commented on why she wanted to go forward with something like this:
“We’re not trying to supersede it. We just want to be there in case something happens — or doesn’t happen — and ensure that we get to properly roast the president.”
Maybe there will be a few in Washington who will not appreciate some of the confusion, but the funny thing to us is that if this was the President Obama administration, Bee would probably be in consideration for the actual event. We cannot see that being the case now. In going back to the George W. Bush administration, we did see him sometimes hire people like Stephen Colbert whose viewers were clearly not in line with his own. It just remains to be seen if that is something that will happen here.
No matter what, we’ll continue to have coverage of the dinner. Doing so has become somewhat of a tradition here at the site, so that is not something that we necessarily see changing.
Tell us: What do you think about Bee’s idea in particular? Share now in the comments!