This Year's White House Correspondents' Dinner Will Abandon Any Semblance of Fun

The White House Correspondents’ Association, patron saint of an event that shouldn’t exist to begin with, is trying something new this year: making its annual Correspondents’ Dinner as boring as humanly possible to avoid a repeat of last year’s controversy.

In previous years, the WHCD has been a circlejerk of every name-brand journalist, joined by celebrity guests and, generally, the president, for a night of chummy collegiality.

Most years, the WHCA hires a comedian to lightly roast everyone—but not too much!—for fear of dislodging the massive sticks up the asses of everyone in the room, as Michelle Wolf did last year. As you may remember, the president skipped the event and sent Sarah Huckabee Sanders in his place, and Wolf let her have it, telling jokes that violated some incredibly boring line between “acceptable to idiot blowhards” and “not acceptable to idiot blowhards.” This kicked off a days-long, very stupid controversy mainly fueled by the kind of people who work for The Hill.

Now, the WHCA announced on Monday its solution to all of this: bringing on presidential biographer Ron Chernow to host the event.

Chernow is many things, but he is not a comedian, so we can count on very little comedy this year. Instead, Chernow will “make the case for the first Amendment,” in an undoubtedly long-winded speech that will have Jim Acosta fully torqued in less than a minute.

After the news was announced, Wolf tweeted to criticize the move:

But something Chernow has that no comedian can boast? He’s appeared on C-SPAN 19 times before, which has to be some kind of record:

The idea of making the dinner even more boring than it already was first cropped up after the ensuing Wolf “controversy” last year, as one of several extremely stupid ideas to make it more hospitable to the fascist chuds currently in office.