Post-Colbert, WH Correspondent's Dinner returns to Carson-era humor: "Disgraceful, lame, mediocre."

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Mon Apr-23-07 01:48 AM
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Post-Colbert, WH Correspondent's Dinner returns to Carson-era humor: "Disgraceful, lame, mediocre."

NYT: Carson-Era Humor, Post-Colbert
By DAVID CARR
Published: April 23, 2007

....Last year, Mr. Colbert looked across the sea of tuxedos and referred to the members of the press as �clowns.�

Because he failed to acknowledge both the propriety and the primacy of the establishment press, Mr. Colbert bombed inside the room, drawing disapproving looks from all quarters and little initial coverage. But in the days following his performance, the normally prosaic C-Span feed of the event was viewed approximately 2.7 million times in just 48 hours on YouTube.

This year, the correspondents� association decided to regain custody of the event, sending out the message that it values Washington as it used to be, a maypole for policy and power, even as the next generation of consumers gathers more news and information from outside the mainstream media.

(Rich) Little, a one-man time machine, obliged by dialing the room back decades to a time when Uncle Walter told us that�s the way it is, Johnny Carson tucked us all in and a bit about Richard Nixon singing �My Way� was considered naughty fun. A painful piano ditty that would not pass muster in the Catskills made fun, not of the president, but of something we can all get behind: Osama bin Laden�s turban. �And you thought Colbert was bad,� Mr. Little said after one particularly acute miss....

***

It wasn�t just this year�s entertainment that had the faint whiff of mothballs. The correspondents� dinner, with its formal attire, pretty frocks and celebrity guests, is Washington�s version of the Oscars. But this year, it felt as though all the movies were from the 1950s.

The stabs at pop cultural salience, like a mailed-in video top-ten list from David Letterman and the presence of C-listers like actors from �Reno: 911!,� only seemed to emphasize the distance between Washington and the rest of the country. The advertisers, a big part of the reason the event remains frantically attended, got a nice mix of celebrity and wonkery, but the dinner had the feeling of an artifact, not of a contemporary event.

Of course, outside the confines of the cozy dinner, many of the attendees are doing important work that has had profound effects on both the public discourse and the current administration. And even though some of that work was cited in awards given out Saturday night, that�s not what the evening was about.

Christopher Hitchens, the writer and Vanity Fair columnist, walked out of the dinner at about the time Mr. Little got around to his Ronald Reagan impression.

�The event was disgraceful, so lame and mediocre that it is beyond parody,� he said later. �It is impossible to decide which is more offensive: the president fawning over the press or the press fawning over the president. It expresses everything that the public means when they talk about inside-the-Beltway and access journalism.�...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/business/media/23carr.html