The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner returned to Washington D.C. on Saturday night, drawing top government officials, celebrities, journalists and even protesters for the highly-anticipated event dubbed the “Nerd Prom.”
President Joe Biden and his wife Jill joined the Hollywood elite like Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live fame, who headlined as the evening’s entertainer. Once inside, Biden took the stage to roast Jost, Donald Trump, and even poke fun at his own age as the first octogenarian presidential candidate.
His jokes ranged from addressing Jost’s wife Scarlett Johansson as “clearly the funny one” to acknowledging he was running against “a six-year-old” in Trump.
When it was time for Colin Jost to deliver his set, some of his jokes got mixed reviews, especially ones about the president’s speaking abilities and his jabs at Senator Bernie Sanders.
However, he still managed to recover with some really good jokes about the 2024 election. He said:
“Let me see if I can summarize where this race stands at this moment. The Republican candidate for president owes half a billion in fines for bank fraud and is currently spending his days farting himself awake during a porn star hush money trial and the race is tied?!..Nothing makes sense anymore.
The candidate who is a New York City playboy took abortion rights away, and the guy who is trying to give your abortion rights back is an 80-year-old Catholic. How does that make sense? By the way, President Biden — isn’t it crazy that he’s only our second Catholic president? And what’s even crazier is that in just a few short months, we will have our third in RFK Jr”
Colin Jost later sincerely praised Biden’s “decency” and the vital role journalists play in protecting free speech.
“My grandpa voted for decency, and decency is why we’re all here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to make jokes about each other and one of us doesn’t go to prison after — we go to the Newsmax after party…When you look at the levels of freedom throughout history, and even around the world today, this is the exception.
This freedom is incredibly rare and the journalists in this room help protect that freedom, and we cannot ever take that for granted.”
The star-studded gala raised funds for the White House Correspondents’ Association’s work supporting journalists and the First Amendment. Before the festivities began, protesters gathered outside the Washington Hilton denouncing the deaths of journalists in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire on Israel’s military operations.
