Michelle Wolf mocks her Correspondents' Dinner speech critics on Late Night with Seth Meyers
Comedienne Michelle Wolf sat down with Late Night host Seth Meyers on May 9 where she spoke about the controversies that arose from her hosting the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Meyers started his show by telling the former writer for Late Night and the Daily Show that her performance was great and that she did an "incredible job" at the dinner.
She said of her speech: "It went great and every single person loved it. Across the board, everyone loved it and actually, Sarah Huckabee Sanders called me and said 'I loved it so much, I got every joke.'"
Meyers spoke about how some people were completely against her speech because of how controversial it was to which she replied: "You give the best information you have at the time."
Wolf got into some major trouble in April when she made some comments about Sanders, the White House Press Secretary. Commentators heavily criticized the comedienne for making fun of Sanders' looks by saying she looked like a "softball coach". She also commented on Sanders' eye makeup.
After she started receiving a lot of heat for her comments, many comedians came to her aid and defended her, including Meyers, on whose show she worked as a writer from 2014-2016. After the controversy, she asked her critics directly in a tweet why they were "making this about Sarah's looks?".
Following this, Meyers showed her a tweet that C-SPAN had made which claimed that three days after the Correspondents' Dinner speech, her sketch had become the most-watched video on their site and it got more views than even Meyers' speech in 2011. She said: "I think that means I'm the father of your children now."
Meyers then showed his audience a photo of Wolf with her staff of writers walking into a party after her controversial speech and the host asked her what they were all chanting in the image. Wolf suppresses a laugh and says, "They're chanting 'Lock her up!'". This was a reference to the chant that Trump supporters made against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign.
Wolf was on Late Night because she was promoting her new show on Netflix called 'The Break With Michelle Wolf' and it premiered on March 27. Speaking about her show, she said: "If you hated the Correspondents' Dinner, you're really going to hate this show."
Meyers then asks Wolf if she managed to learn anything from her stint as one of his writers on Late Night in the early days of her career and she said: "Every morning I walk into the writers' room and I reference foreign films that no one's ever seen. 'Have you seen The Dark Trombone?'"
Wolf then said: "I'm really lucky because I don't have any Michelles on my staff, so all my writers are nice."
Meyers, to give a little more context to the audience, explained that Wolf would write jokes for her former boss just because she wanted him to say them and that she never expected them to actually be there on the show. He said: "You wanted to watch me fail."
When talking about Wolf's comments that Netflix lets her tell the kind of jokes that her previous bosses would never have let her say, Meyers asks for an example. The comedienne then spoke about how she wanted Clinton to win the elections in 2016: "I wanted to show that women can do anything as long as her husband did it first."
In a segment titled "Jokes Seth Can't Tell" that took place earlier on in the show with Meyers and two of the Late Night writers, Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel, Meyers ended it by telling a joke and the three women scolding him. Wolf then used this opportunity to mock her critics from the Correspondents' Dinner by saying to Meyers, "That was not in the spirit of the event," with an exaggerated expression of shock on her face.