“Saturday Night Live” cast member Colin Jost headlined the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, and like some of the comedians before him, he delivered some jokes that were perhaps slightly too edgy for the crowd in Washington, D.C.
“We’re all here tonight at nerd prom. Well, Matt Gaetz is at regular prom,” Jost said, in a not-so-subtle reference to allegations that the Florida Republican had sex with a 17-year-old (Gaetz has vehemently denied the allegations, and the Justice Department closed its investigation without filing charges).
The comedian made some gentle barbs at President Joe Biden and the media, and then some more about Trump, joking that both presidential candidates are so old that “Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, ‘I could maybe win this thing.’”
Jost also brought up Trump’s legal troubles and touched on the differences between the two candidates. “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?” Jost asked incredulously. “The candidate who is a famous New York City playboy took abortion rights away, and the guy who’s trying to give you your abortion rights back is an 80-year-old Catholic. How does that make sense?”
Lara Trump, the recently minted Republican National Committee co-chair who was in attendance, was also singled out. Jost joked about her cover of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” saying, “I can’t believe I’m saying this to a member of the Trump family, but maybe stick to politics.”
Jost did inject some earnestness into his speech at the end, telling Biden that his late grandfather had voted for him “because you’re a decent man.” Jost follows a long line of comedians who have roasted the president at the annual dinner. Not everyone has the stomach for it, though. Former President Donald Trump, who attended the dinner as a guest in 2011, was mocked so ruthlessly by then-President Barack Obama that it “accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world,” The New York Times reported in 2016. Trump never attended the event as president — the only president to do so since Calvin Coolidge — though he was still brutally roasted in absentia.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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