Michelle Wolf has traded the U.S. for Spain — Barcelona to be exact. But the former Daily Show contributor and star of her own Netflix talk show, 39, went there “for a boy,” as she puts it, not as any kind of political statement.
Not that the latter assumption is so far-fetched.
Wolf’s now-legendary 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was not attended by Donald Trump but was attended by his then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, drew a torrent of angry responses — and not all from the right. Journalists from The New York Times, MSNBC and NBC News criticized the set as being too mean to Sanders.
Of course, MAGA-ites hated it too, none more so than Trump himself, who tweeted the “filthy ‘comedian’ totally bombed” before demanding the dinner be canceled entirely or completely reconfigured.
Now in the first year of his second term, Trump is getting his wish. While it had initially hired Amber Ruffin (who, like Wolf, has written for Late Night With Seth Meyers) to deliver that night’s roast, the White House Correspondents’ Association had a change of heart, and disinvited Ruffin from the event, saying the board voted unanimously on the decision, which it made in the name of not focusing “on the politics of division.”
Wolf isn’t buying it, as she told The Hollywood Reporter from her home in Barcelona, where she’s been raising a two-year-old and working out new material on her relatively young Punchup.live podcast, Michelle Wolf’s Thought Box.
Hi, Michelle! So you’re in Spain?
I am. Currently, Barcelona would like you to call it Catalonia, not Spain.
So you have your own issues there.
The more you travel, you realize no one likes anybody.
You’re a comedian and TV star. Don’t you need to be in Hollywood?
I’ve never wanted to be in Hollywood. When I first got here, I just Googled “English stand-up comedy,” and there was a comedy club here. I found this great, English-speaking comedy scene. I’ve been able to work on jokes and write my set and then I can travel to America and every joke that I try out here works there.
What’s on your mind lately in terms of your comedy?
It depends. In stand-up, I try to do things that I can say for a long period of time. A lot of that’s currently jokes about having a toddler and being a working mom and a lot of larger societal problems. But then on my podcast, I do a lot more topical stuff because I’m doing about 40 new minutes of material every week.
I know that comedians like to work material in a closed room with no cameras out until it’s perfect and then unleash it. So what made you want to do this?
I’m personally not a fan of podcasts — just people rambling on, which is fine if that’s your thing, but that’s not for me. I wanted to keep my podcast as close to stand-up as possible, and so I just made it stand-up. I gave myself a massive amount of work every single week, and from the sound of my laryngitis, clearly I’m thriving. We do it at this swanky hotel bar, but we’re playing around with venues. There’s a real, live audience. I can see if people laugh or don’t laugh. Some of the jokes are good and some of them are bad, and I don’t do those ones again. But some of them are so bad that I still do them, anyway.
For the masochist in you?
I have this theory with jokes — that they’re all kind of stacked up in your throat and if you don’t tell the bad ones, they keep the good ones from coming out.
Like a Pez dispenser. Let’s talk about the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
My favorite topic.
I remember it as you being hilarious, and I of course remember the “smoky eye” joke. That was the one that really got people pissed on their side. So what are your memories of that night? Did you walk away feeling you had nailed it?
I still think I nailed it. I think it’s aging very well. I had a great time writing the jokes. I had a great time running the set in New York. I had maybe twice as many jokes that I used that I was working out in New York the whole month before. And then the night of, I had a very fun time telling the jokes. I particularly enjoyed how tight everybody got.
Tight as in uncomfortable?
Exactly. I had a really nice time at the afterparty with all my friends and all the writers from my show and everyone. We had a really fun time. While we were at the after party, I kept seeing all this stuff start to appear [on social media and in the news].
I was really happy with what I was saying — not just the jokes, but what I was actually saying. There’s a lot of times when you’re like, “I’m proud of this, but I don’t know if it’s going to latch.” But I saw it right away [on my phone.] I was like, “Oh, wow.”
It latched.
Yeah. I would still love for someone to explain to me how they thought that joke was making fun of her appearance. Because there’s not a shred of it that says anything about how she looks.
Did any of the offended Republicans in the room confront you the night of?
Of course not. I remember as we were leaving, I literally said to Sarah, “Have a great night!”
Did she acknowledge you?
No. I remember Stormy Daniels’ lawyer [Michael Avenatti] said something complimentary but “look out” kind of thing. I was like, if Stormy Daniels’ lawyer is telling me watch out, maybe I am in trouble.
And then in the aftermath, were you scared? What happened?
No, I was working on my show that I had at the time, The Break, that was on Netflix. That’s the thing about stand-up. There’s always the next gig. I think the thing that really legitimately warmed my heart was that all these other comedians had my back 1,000 percent.
Were you getting threatening messages or hate messages?
Oh yeah, I got plenty of those. I think it’s pretty funny, to be honest. All these people that are like, “Fuck your feelings.” And then you got Elon Musk being like, “legalize comedy.” It’s like, “No, you guys — we are fine with it. You need to be fine with it.”
And so now in the Trump 2.0, all the concerning things you joked about that night seem to be all the more heightened. Are you worried?
I genuinely think we could be getting to a point where we don’t really have free speech and people, including comedians, might not be able to say everything that we’ve been able to say in the past. You have some of those podcast bros that are like, “With Trump, there’s going to be no censorship.” And you’re like, “Yes, there is.” First of all, what weren’t you allowed to say? As far as I know, nothing was off limits. But now there is censorship.
The fact that they hire Amber Ruffin and then they got rid of her — I think it’s both the Trump Administration and also the White House Correspondence Association being worried about not just the jokes, but the truth being told. Because that’s what good jokes do. They illuminate the truth. And it’s not just Trump who’s letting a bunch of people down. A lot of these journalists are also letting a bunch of people down in the way they’re reporting and just their general inability to call things out or say what’s really going on out of fear of losing access.
What did happen there, exactly? What was their justification?
They said that they wanted to keep the focus on journalism and the scholarships. OK, fine. It’s your dinner. But like Amber said, she was going to be terribly mean — which I think is fair when you’re doing terribly mean things. It’s also very fair when you’re doing a roast. That’s what a roast is. A roast is mean.
So you think the association was capitulating Trump’s attacks on the media and withholding of access.
I think they didn’t want to make Trump mad. And that’s a really, really scary place to be in journalism. Even a good leader will make people angry and make decisions that are worth making fun of. They are going to make decisions that journalists need to report the truth on. And if you don’t want to make that subject mad, it’s a lot harder to do that.
I was looking at Netflix yesterday, and the No. 4 show on the platform was Tony Hinchcliffe’s show Kill Tony. It was interesting to see him open for Trump at a rally, then have the world turn on him for the Puerto Rico thing. But now he’s still chugging along at the top Netflix charts. What do you make of the Tony Hinchcliffe phenomenon and how does it fit into where we are right now as a culture?
I haven’t watched it, but what I know of the show, it’s not necessarily him doing stand-up. It’s him having other comedians come on — I think they get a minute or two to tell jokes. So basically, he’s just a content curator and he’s not really doing the heavy lifting of comedy. I think right now we’re in a time where mediocrity is being highlighted because everyone can be mediocre, and not everyone can be excellent.
