No, Michelle Wolf Didn't Joke About Sarah Huckabee Sanders's Looks

By Jen Chaney, Vulture

30 April 18

s soon as Michelle Wolf finished delivering her blistering White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast of the Trump administration and the members of the press that cover it, she was, not surprisingly, criticized for much of what she said. Oddly, however, a lot of that criticism zeroed in on something that Michelle Wolf did not actually say: a joke about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s appearance.

After Wolf’s scathing, unapologetic, and often funny remarks, several prominent journalists called her out for mocking the White House press secretary because of her looks. Maggie Haberman, the New York Times White House correspondent, weighed in with this tweet.

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski — whose engagement to her Morning Joe co-host, Joe Scarborough, Wolf described in her speech as “like when a #MeToo works out” — voiced a similar concern.

Like-minded criticisms were sounded from other corners of the political Twitterverse, causing a number of people — including New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, Kumail Nanjiani, and, less importantly, me — to express confusion followed by outrage. I was baffled and irritated by this particular critique of Wolf’s performance because, again, and I cannot stress this enough, Michelle Wolf did not criticize Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or any other woman, about her appearance. Wolf herself even clarified this point earlier today on Twitter.

The two jokes that seemed to irk critics were her Handmaid’s Tale dig — “I have to say I’m a little starstruck. I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale” — and the aforementioned line about Sanders’s smoky eye, which went like this: “I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”

Neither of these jokes are about Sanders’s appearance. The first one suggests that, like the character Ann Dowd plays on the Hulu series based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, Sanders acts as a complicit oppressor on behalf of an authoritarian government. The other joke riffs on a Maybelline slogan to highlight the fact that Sanders lies to the American people on a regular basis on behalf of her boss. You can be offended by either of these insinuations, but at least be offended by what Wolf actually insinuated.

For the record, when Wolf took aim at White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, she didn’t say a single thing about her appearance either. Instead, the focus was on Conway’s dishonesty: “You guys have got to stop putting Kellyanne on your shows,” Wolf told a ballroom filled with cable news producers, anchors, and reporters who repeatedly put Kellyanne Conway on their shows. “All she does is lie. If you don’t give her a platform, she has nowhere to lie. It’s like that old saying: If a tree falls in the woods, how do we get Kellyanne under that tree? I’m not suggesting she gets hurt. Just stuck. Stuck under a tree.”

It would have been easy for Wolf to take a cheap shot at either of these women for some superficial offense, like the way they dress or talk. As Nussbaum points out, that’s what Trump would have done, and has done on many occasions. But nothing about what Michelle Wolf did on Saturday night was easy. It was hard, harder even than the truthtelling that Stephen Colbert did to President George W. Bush’s face at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. True, Colbert was dressing down the commander in chief in his actual presence, something Wolf didn’t have the opportunity to do since Trump, for the second year in a row, couldn’t muster the courage to show up for this event. But Colbert could at least hide behind his alter ego as the conservative host of The Colbert Report. Wolf had to go out there as only the fourth female comedian to perform solo at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, drop a bunch of truth bombs, then sit back down with no shield to provide cover.

She wasn’t always successful. Her first joke about abortion, for example, was a groaner: “[Mike Pence] thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you got to get that baby out of there.” But Wolf’s swipes at the media were genuinely hilarious. Honestly, the bit that made me laugh the hardest was the one she did about MSNBC: “MSNBC’s news slogan is, ‘This is who we are.’ Guys, it’s not a good slogan. ‘This is who we are’ is what your mom thinks the sad show on NBC is called. “Did you watch This Is Who We Are this week? Someone left on a Crock-Pot and everyone died.”

Not surprisingly, though, it’s the jabs that Wolf threw at Sanders and other Trump staffers that are getting criticized today, not just because some of them were funny but because they legitimately stung. To acknowledge what actually made the smoky eye line funny meant that some of the people in that ballroom had to reflect on the fact that they either lie, enable liars, or act nicely to liars because that’s what they sometimes have to do to get the information the public deserves to know. That’s the sort of situation that makes people itchy.

But here’s the thing: If the worst thing that happens to you while you’re working for Trump is that a woman from The Daily Show says a few mean things about you while you’re wearing a nice dress, eating a free meal, and drinking some wine, you are still having a better day than a hell of a lot of people in this country. Also, this is part of the job when you’re a public servant. When Don Imus addressed the Radio and TV Correspondents Association back in 1996, he made all kinds of controversial comments about President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, both of whom were sitting right there on the dais. Imus was not nearly as incisive or funny as Wolf was last night — one of the biggest laughs he got was a joke about Sally Struthers being fat, the kind of punching-down humor that Wolf was accused of committing but didn’t. The Clintons took all of his pot shots, everyone fretted afterward about how inappropriate it was, and then life in Washington moved on.

Life in Washington will move on from this, too. But before it does, I want to pause and make sure it’s clear why I and others reacted the way we did to the backlash against Wolf’s speech. It wasn’t because the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is so important to our nation — I’m guessing most of the country, if not the vast majority, has no idea it even happened last night — or because Wolf is the most brilliant comedian who’s ever lived. I thought she was pretty funny, but that’s not really the point. The issue is that those who expressed shock about her performance could not see the obliviousness and hypocrisy in their responses.

Take the lead item in Mike Allen’s Axios newsletter, which noted, in a critical tone, that Wolf “made several uses of a vulgarity that begins with ‘p,’ in an audience filled with Washington officials, top journalists and a few baseball legends (Brooks Robinson, Tony La Russa and Dennis Eckersley).” The word pussy has become part of the national lexicon because Donald Trump said it in an Access Hollywood video. It’s since been uttered in news broadcasts, printed in newspapers, and spoken in an episode of Roseanne that aired at 8 p.m. on network TV. The idea that Wolf is vulgar because she said it in a room full of “top journalists,” while possibly sullying the virginal ears of the great Brooks Robinson, is utterly ridiculous.

But what’s even worse than misguided pearl-clutching is the fact that Wolf is getting criticized for things that she never even said. It’s not unlike the experience that plays out when Trump and his staff, including Sanders, peddle “alternative facts” to the public: If you’re paying attention to the actual facts, it makes you question your own sense of reality. This is why, after seeing the criticism of Wolf’s jokes about Sanders, I felt like I had to rewatch that portion of her speech again because surely I must have missed something.

On a night designed to celebrate the importance of journalism, somehow, what some people heard was a jab about a smoky eye. They’re missing the underlying point of Wolf’s comedy: That what should concern every American are the smokescreens that Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other members of the Trump administration create, and that make it so hard for White House correspondents to uncover the actual truth.

Why Molly Ringwald Spoke Out About John Hughes and #MeToo: 'Things Have to Change'

By Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast

29 April 18

The actress talks about her new film at the Tribeca Film Festival and why it’s hard, but important, to reconsider John Hughes’s legacy at this cultural moment.

hroughout her entire career, Molly Ringwald has been escaping clichés.

It’s right there in the script for The Breakfast Club: “You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal,” when, of course, the teenagers John Hughes crafted were anything but those archetypes. There’s her lightning-bolt, Time cover-minted takeover of the zeitgeist, redefining the ingénue movie star for a new generation with what critic Pauline Kael called a “charismatic normality,” encapsulating the new adolescent spirit.

It applies to the way in which she settled, once the flashbulbs stopped going off, into a journeywoman’s acting career onstage and onscreen—a husband and three children off-screen—when cautionary tales abound involving other young stars of her stature.

And it’s in the way she talks frankly about her experience in the industry and her evolved feelings about her work and the message those films sent, most recently in an essay for The New Yorker reconsidering her projects with John Hughes in the wake of the #MeToo cultural moment.

Ringwald, who in recent years has found herself connecting with a new generation playing mother to the leads on teen dramas Riverdale and The Secret Life of an American Teenager, meets me in a downtown New York hotel during the Tribeca Film Festival, where her new film, All These Small Moments, had its premiere.

Amidst a discussion about her decision to write about Hughes, we’re once again marveling at that aforementioned ability to escape clichés, which she does in All These Small Moments, playing mother to a teen boy weathering a tumultuous coming-of-age in New York City.

“I’ve played moms before,” she says. “I’m a mother. I feel very often the mothers are very archetypal. They’re loving and nurturing and they’ll say, ‘You’ll figure it out, honey,’ and pat the kid on the head and leave. This was an opportunity to play somebody who was more complex.”

In the film, her character is in the painful position of realizing her marriage might be over yet still attempting to provide a semblance of routine for her two sons during the dissolution. At one point, her character is busying herself knitting in the kitchen, an attempt to distract from her anger at her husband. Her son asks if he can help her with anything, and she erupts, “Yes, dear, you can knit me a fucking sweater.”

Ringwald does a spit-take when I recount the line to her. “To me, that’s absolutely real,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually said that but I might have said something comparable to one of my kids. It’s never your best moment, but we have really great moments, too.”

What’s striking about speaking with Ringwald is that, though we’re meeting in the middle of a festival press day—a gauntlet of photo calls and video hits and speed-date interviews and social media callouts—she decidedly centers herself in our conversation, resisting platitudes and retreads that are systemic of junket press days and eager to engage more analytically with her work.

Because we’re meeting so soon after the publishing of her New Yorker essay, much of our half-hour together is spent discussing points she brings up in her piece—not to mention the trepidation that gave way to catharsis when she decided to write it in the first place.

It’s Ringwald’s second essay for The New Yorker. The first published soon after the Harvey Weinstein allegations came out, recounting her experience with sexual misconduct in the industry. That one came together pretty quickly, Ringwald says. Her John Hughes piece, however, involved reporting, layers of consideration and reflection, and multiple drafts.

She revisits The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink—the movies that defined her career—through a critical eye sharpened by the conversations going around us today. She recoils at the scenes in which John looks under Claire’s skirt in The Breakfast Club, or when sex with Jake’s drunk girlfriend is bartered in exchange for Samantha’s underwear in Sixteen Candles. She chronicles the hardly veiled racism and homophobia of Hughes’ films, researches into Hughes’ problematic pre-Breakfast Club works, and wonders how she could justify any of this for her teenage daughter.

It’s a remarkable piece of film criticism, hardly the only to reconsider Hughes’ career but the first to be written by his star-making muse. She grapples with the grayness of complex ideas that are too often thought of in the binary; knocks the notion that, because of the hallowed influence of his films, Hughes’ catalogue is sacrosanct; and gives respect and space to her own experiences and relationship to him.

“Those films are incredibly meaningful to me,” she says. “They are so much a part of my personal history and they’re also a part of other people’s history. I wanted to tread carefully about that. I was also coming out at it from it’s not black and white. There are layers to it. It took a long time to write.”

There’s a particular passage of the essay that resonates most.

“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” she writes. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it…John’s movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teen-agers experience. Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say—even criticizing them makes me feel like I’m divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career. And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet…”

Ringwald tells us it was nerve-wracking to articulate that, but she’s found it gratifying that, rather than be accused of cinematic blasphemy or somehow being ungrateful for the work that launched her career, people actually heard her.

“You always hope that when you write something that it will be understood the way you intended it, and I feel like for the most part it has been,” she says. “All of those movies that I did, I act in them—I didn’t write them. So it’s like I have a certain feeling of ownership, but not entirely. When you write something, for me it’s the closest I can feel to, ‘I did this. This is me. This is how I feel and no one changed it.’ So it’s this feeling of ownership.”

Our conversation turns to the greater #MeToo movement that inspired her to write the piece. “The world feels like it’s shifting a little bit,” she says.

She recognizes how often what seem like hot cultural conversations tend to eventually dissipate as the steam wafts off them, especially in this news cycle, but says, “This has never happened, though. It just feels different…We’re not through. I feel like it’s going to be a little bit messy for a while. People are still figuring out the rules. But also new generations are coming in too, with different political views and different points of view. Things are changing. Things have to change.”

Before we say goodbye, we talk briefly about the next crop of movies being compared to John Hughes films: Every few years, and any time there’s a trend of coming-of-age stories hitting theaters featuring a new generation of actors, the comparisons are made. Ringwald says she’s actually adapting the book When We Were Animals to hopefully direct. “It’s a part I would have liked to play then,” she says. “I wouldn’t necessarily call it John Hughes. It’s a little darker.”

She’s excited for the Chloe Grace Moretz-starring The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a coming-of-age-dramedy set at a gay conversion therapy camp, and was politely enthusiastic while we gushed about Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, both of which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. She’s seen Love, Simon, and explodes in a smile when I bring it up.

“I know they were kind of setting out to make a gay John Hughes film, which I think that alone to me is just great,” she says. “There are no gay characters in his movies, like I talk about in the article that I wrote. Well, let’s it put it this way: there are no openly gay characters. I feel like there’s quite a few closeted gay characters in those movies.” Then, laughing, “But there’s no gay themes. I feel like it’s really time for that, and I want to see that.”

I get the sense that it’s a question she’s been asked before. “I don’t want anybody to set out and try to make a carbon copy of a John Hughes movie, because you can’t. And there’s no reason to. Because that was a particular time and place,” she says, laying out a sort of industry mission statement. “I’m interested to see projects that really capture what it’s really like to be a teenager, where it’s not too slick and doesn’t seem like it was written by adults. I think that’s what John Hughes did so well.”