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April 30, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show

42:19

Ep. 147 - Claps Not Laughs: Michelle Wolf And The Death Of Comedy

Michelle Wolf is not a comedienne. We'll explain why her schtick bombed, the difference between comedy and Important Comedy™, and why the Left can't tell jokes. Then, my latest video on leftist abuse of language for PragerU! (How do we get it to Kanye?) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Until 50 years ago, only men were allowed to attend the White House Correspondence Dinner.
	And after Michelle Wolf's cringe-fest performance on Saturday night, the Correspondence Association is considering reinstating that rule.
	We will analyze why Wolf's schtick bombed, the difference between comedy and important comedy, and why the left can't tell jokes these days.
	Then, my latest video for PragerU on leftist abuse of language.
	Somebody get it to Kanye.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
	So there's a lot to get to today.
	It is also, I didn't mention this at the top, it's Cecile Richards' last day at Planned Parenthood.
	She's the maniacal ghoul who has run Planned Parenthood for a decade, and I'm sort of sorry to see her go.
	I'll explain why.
	We'll also play the audio of my new PragerU video at the end here.
	Mostly because I really want Kanye to see this.
	Kanye is now on a run of Scott Adams, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens.
	I think this is the time for him to see my PragerU video.
	So please tweet it at him.
	It's about language.
	It's about if you control the words, you control the culture.
	So, you know, go find it on YouTube.
	Tweet it at Kanye.
	I'd really appreciate that.
	We're really trying to expedite his process in political transformation here.
	Before we get to these things, because I want to analyze this Michelle Wolf thing bit by bit.
	There's a ton of fake news about it.
	Everybody's lying to themselves.
	Nobody thought it was funny.
	We will explain why.
	I actually know why her shtick failed.
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	Okay, so the White House Correspondents' Dinner was on Saturday.
	They call this Nerd Prom, and by they, I mean the people who go.
	No one else calls it Nerd Prom, like regular people don't call it Nerd Prom, and it isn't Nerd Prom.
	This is so absurd.
	This is so self-aggrandizing.
	It's all these, you know, journalists and bloggers and TV types, and they call it Nerd Prom because what they're saying is, we're really smart.
	It's a nerd problem because we're nerds, so we put on our tuxedos.
	You're not nerds.
	Nerds are smart.
	Brian Stelter and Don Lemon and Jim Acosta are not nerds.
	They're dummies, I'm sorry to say.
	I don't want to be mean to you guys, but you're not nerds.
	You can't call yourselves nerds.
	You look good on TV. At least Jim Acosta does.
	But you're not nerds.
	Jim Acosta, I think the height of his intellectual activity is staring at himself in the mirror and smiling.
	That is what Jim Acosta does.
	So, this happened on Saturday.
	A ton of backlash against the main performer.
	So the White House Correspondents' Dinner has been going on since the Coolidge administration, and they would always have some sort of entertainment.
	Some celebrities would show up.
	Sinatra started going in the 70s, and by, I think it was 1985, that was the first year they invited a comedian.
	To give the monologue at this event.
	Now, these have been going on for a long time.
	They had some good ones in the early 2000s.
	Norm MacDonald came.
	He was great.
	Daryl Hammond came.
	Even Stephen Colbert pushed the edge a little bit, but he was still fine.
	This woman bombed.
	I mean, it was really awful.
	She totally bombed, and now...
	Some people are trying to defend her and say it was good, even though really no one thinks that.
	The View.
	Leave it to The View.
	view.
	Here are the ladies at the view defending Michelle Wolf's monologue.
	I'm sorry.
	That was just a bunch of cackling hyenas.
	Just Do we, can you, easy to confuse, do we have the clip of the view?
	You guys gotta stop putting Kellyanne on your shows.
	All she does is 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.
	I actually really like Sarah.
	I think she's very resourceful.
	Like, she burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye.
	Like, maybe she's born with it.
	Maybe it's lies.
	It's probably lies.
	They're laughing their heads off here.
	So did she go too far?
	Well, when I first saw the coverage of it, because I hadn't seen it live, I thought that someone had really pushed the limit, because every headline was, it was awful, it was uncomfortable.
	Then I read it and watched the clips, and the comedian did her job.
	She is there to come and push the envelope.
	That's what comedians do.
	If people have a problem with it, it might be taking issue with this dinner as a whole in these times.
	No, that isn't true.
	That isn't her job.
	Look, there have been plenty of comedians on, I guess they're all on the left, some are not quite on the left, but they're usually on the left, and no one's taken any issue with them.
	Even Stephen Colbert, who really actually did kind of go up to the edge, but that isn't their job.
	The job of a comedian is not to push the envelope.
	The job of a comedian is to be funny.
	That's the only job of the comedian.
	And this gets, I had Owen Benjamin on the show a few weeks ago, and he talked about this big distinction in comedians.
	The ones who go for claps, not laughs.
	The one, like, Jimmy Kimmel can't be funny anymore because the left lost its sense of humor.
	So now, instead of telling jokes on his show, instead of making people laugh, he makes political statements.
	And then they don't laugh because it isn't funny, so they just clap.
	They clap approvingly.
	They say, Mmm, wow, yeah, mmm.
	He said a thing, mmm, yeah.
	It didn't tickle me because he's not doing his job, but mmm.
	You know, this is the distinction between comedy and important comedy.
	This is the main distinction in comedians these days.
	Because there are comedians who make people laugh and they tell jokes.
	And then there are people who can't make others laugh, who can't tell jokes, so they do important comedy.
	This kind of ruined George Carlin, even.
	When he decided to become a philosopher instead of a comedian.
	Very talented comedian.
	And then he started doing this philosopher shtick.
	It isn't great.
	It isn't what comedy is for.
	But people totally misunderstand the job of comedians.
	They say, you're there to speak truth to power.
	No, that's what journalists are there for.
	They totally derelicted their duty for a decade.
	And now they are the butt of jokes.
	Now they're sort of the clowns rather than the journalists or the comedians.
	And the comedians are there to make people laugh.
	So...
	Look, I'm not surprised that the view isn't the most insightful place to look for commentary on this.
	The left and anti-Trump conservatives now are calling those of us who didn't like the shtick hypocrites.
	They're saying, oh, what, are you offended, snowflakes?
	Or you're always saying we're offended.
	Now you're offended.
	It's not quite that I'm offended.
	I am offended because it's not in good taste, but I don't really care.
	It's just that it isn't funny.
	And The set bombed.
	Everyone admits that the set bombed.
	Even the left admits it.
	This isn't some left-right thing.
	The left admits it bombs.
	Douglas Brinkley, who's a CNN talking head who refers to himself as a presidential historian, Douglas Brinkley came on for reaction after the correspondence dinner, and they said, what do you think?
	And he said, well, you know, there were some good lines.
	He was trying to put a good spin on it.
	No, there were a couple good liners.
	And then they brought him on again.
	He said, well...
	Yeah, I mean, well, yikes.
	And then the third time they brought him on, he said, okay, they've got to cancel this dinner.
	This was a disaster.
	Margaret Taleb, the head of the White House Correspondents Association, she defended Wolf.
	She called Wolf a talented comedian who had a message to deliver, and she did deliver a message.
	Again, this is back to the views, misunderstanding of comedy.
	The point of comedy isn't to deliver a message, it's to make people laugh.
	So then the head of the White House Correspondents Association said, unfortunately, the entertainer's monologue was not in the spirit of that mission to unify the country.
	So even the White House Correspondents Association said, Maggie Haberman criticized it.
	Maggie Haberman, more than basically any journalist, was totally in the tank for Hillary.
	The Hillary campaign openly talked about this with one another in memoranda that have since come out.
	But Maggie Haberman tweeted out, she said, that the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out on national television, was impressive.
	Because Michelle Wolf was really crude to President Trump, and then almost exclusively the women in the Trump administration.
	Those were her two targets, Trump and the women in the Trump administration.
	Now, I have to say, a lot of this sounds like a little too little too late, because everybody was laughing in the room.
	I don't know that it was like real laughter, but it was...
	At least performed laughter.
	All of those left-wing journalists there, they gave her her laughs.
	They played into some of the bits.
	She did this thing.
	Well, we'll get to it in a little bit, but Michelle Wolfe had this segment where she would call out something, and then the whole audience would call back.
	So they were in it, and then they realized how awful it looked afterward, and they said, okay, we've got to throw her under the bus.
	We've got to throw Wolf under the bus because Wolf was vulgar.
	She was vicious to women about their appearance.
	She was profane.
	And what all of the media people realized, because they were all laughing in the room, but then when they left, they said, uh-oh.
	Now we can't criticize Trump for those things.
	Uh-oh.
	Yikes.
	We just destroyed our main line of attack against Donald Trump.
	Oh yeah, that was really bad.
	We hate her.
	Yada, yada, yada.
	So in that way, I think it was really a great event because it showed them to be the hypocrites that they are.
	So the other ridiculous lie that's going around is that Wolf mocked everybody.
	Look, she mocked everybody.
	Only the GOP is getting offended, you little snowflakes.
	But she mocked everybody.
	The Twitter description of the trending story of the White House Correspondents' Dinner, written by Twitter, said Wolf doled it out to everybody.
	Wolf tarred everybody.
	NBC analyst Howard Feynman wrote about this.
	He said, he tweeted out...
	Regarding Michelle Wolf, one, yup, crude, blunt, pitiless.
	Reminds you of, say, a president?
	Hmm.
	Number two, she torched everyone, even Democrats, Stormy Daniels, the media.
	Three, she wasn't playing to all of America or The Room, but to her Netflix deal.
	Four, she was invited.
	Five, it's not her job to behave.
	And six, she's funny.
	Basically none of that is true or if it's true, it shows that she was terrible.
	Number one, right, he admits here that this was more about attacking the president than being funny.
	They just want, they're out for blood.
	They want to attack the president.
	So it wasn't, it was about attacking the president, right?
	Number two, that's a lie.
	The few jokes that she told about Dems were compliments.
	I think they called it Ben Smithing after the founder of Politico, or after the founder of BuzzFeed, I suppose.
	Ben Smithing is when you say something mean about Democrats, but it's just mean enough to get credibility as an attack, but then it's not so mean that it actually hurts.
	So one of the jokes that Michelle Wolf said was, Democrats are bad because they lose sometimes.
	You know, they're really bad because they lose elections.
	The whole joke was, you know, Republicans could nominate Jeff Pedophile Nazi Doctor and the Democrats would still lose.
	So the whole joke is, Democrats are great and the only flaw is that, I don't know, they're not...
	Charismatic enough, but they're really good.
	Another joke was that Rachel Maddow is just too smart for TV. Rachel Maddow is way too educated for a popular TV show.
	Ha ha ha, that's not an insult, that's not an attack.
	So then number three that the NBC analyst says is...
	That means she didn't do her job.
	If she's playing to all of these places other than the room, then she didn't do her job.
	Yes, he says, number four, she was invited.
	But that was a mistake to invite her.
	It's not her job, sure, it's not her job to behave, but it is her job to read the room and to entertain, which obviously she did not do.
	Obviously the reaction shows she did not do her job.
	And she isn't funny.
	She isn't funny.
	She just makes political statements that this guy at NBC likes.
	But that's not the same thing as being funny.
	There are plenty of people on the conservative side who say things that I like who aren't funny.
	That's good.
	I like them, but that doesn't make them a comedian.
	Now, the final left-wing attack here is that it is hypocritical for Trump supporters to attack this woman for being vulgar and profane and not having class or anything and not being funny.
	They say it's hypocritical because Trump says mean things and he says vulgar things and all that.
	I will explain to you why these cases are completely different.
	Here is a classic example from Donald Trump from one of the debates with Hillary Clinton.
	It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.
	Because you'd be in jail.
	- Secretary Clinton. - That is a very funny line.
	That shows a quick wit.
	It wasn't scripted.
	You know, Michelle Wolfe was reading from her script all night, but that was extemporaneous.
	Very quick wit.
	Now, if Michelle Wolfe were to try to do a joke like that, she would probably just yell in that nasal voice, You're a criminal!
	That's what she was saying all night.
	You lie!
	You're a liar!
	You lie!
	And so, you're a criminal.
	But that's not funny.
	What's funny is waiting for Hillary to tee it up, and then Hillary says...
	I don't want to live in an America where Donald Trump is president.
	So how do you play on that?
	Well, why not?
	One, you could make a joke about her character, her own actions, and you could make a joke about what happens if you're president.
	You play around in this scenario.
	A joke requires detachment.
	It requires space.
	So he says...
	She says, I don't want to live in an America with Donald Trump.
	It's not like he says, yeah, that's right, you wouldn't, you know, because I'd do good things and you would do bad things.
	That would be the Michelle Wolf thing.
	Instead, he goes, yeah, you'd be in jail.
	That's why you wouldn't want it, because you're a crook.
	That's funny, and he's detached enough to enjoy it.
	He's having fun up there.
	He's not just very angry.
	He did this with everybody.
	He did it with Rand Paul.
	He did it with little Marco, to use his phrase.
	And, of course, he did it to Jeb Bush.
	Here is an amazing one from Jeb.
	This is a tough business to run for president.
	Oh, I know.
	You're a tough guy, Jeb.
	And we need to have a leader that is principled.
	You're never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency.
	Well, let's see.
	I'm at 42 and you're at 3, so so far I'm doing better.
	Doesn't matter.
	So far I'm doing better.
	You know, you started off over here, Jeb.
	You're moving over further and further.
	Pretty soon you're going to be off the end.
	This doesn't do a thing to solve the problem.
	Devastating.
	Devastating.
	And the reason that's so funny, well, the main reason it's so funny is because it's true.
	Jeb Bush says, you've got to be real tough like me.
	And so what does Trump do?
	He doesn't say, you're not tough, I'm tough.
	Right, that's what Michelle Wolf would do.
	Instead, he just points out the obvious.
	He says, oh yeah, you're real tough.
	Yeah, no, you're a big tough guy.
	I'm real.
	If you just prick that little ridiculous balloon, it'll pop because we all know what the truth is.
	The other reason it's funny is that he's punching back.
	He isn't really starting these fights.
	Roseanne Barr was tweeting all of the rules for comedy to explain why this schtick didn't work at the correspondence dinner.
	And one thing she said is, never insult someone in the room who's more famous than you.
	Never pick a fight with someone more famous than you because you'll lose the audience.
	And Donald Trump actually doesn't really pick fights.
	He tends just to hit back.
	He did this with Rosie O'Donnell.
	He did this with Jeb Bush.
	He did this with Hillary.
	On and on.
	With Rosie, you saw him.
	He was so vicious with her.
	But he said, look, she insulted me.
	She insulted my business.
	And so with me, I fight back.
	And so it actually makes him the underdog.
	Jeb Bush, in these attacks, Hillary Clinton, they were supposed to be the bigger characters.
	They were supposed to be the more stately people.
	But they degraded themselves, and they kept attacking and attacking.
	So it just gave Trump the opening to punch back, even with John McCain.
	You know, he was so vicious to McCain and basically made fun of his being a prisoner of war.
	But McCain did start it.
	Now, I'm not saying McCain was as vicious to Trump.
	He wasn't.
	But he criticized Trump.
	And what happens with Trump is the minute you hit him, he punches you back at least twice as hard.
	You can argue about whether that's appropriate or nice or whatever, but it's always punching back.
	The other thing about Trump is his comedy isn't essentially angry.
	It plays on anger sometimes, but it's actually not angry in itself.
	It might be a facsimile of anger, but it's not really anger.
	Here's a great example of this.
	So I get a call from one of the reporters yesterday, and they said, the president of Mexico said they will not, under any circumstances, pay for the wall.
	What is your comment?
	I said, the wall just got 10 feet higher.
	It's true.
	It's true.
	Now, if he were really angry, there wouldn't be a joke there.
	He wouldn't know how to play on their reactions, right?
	He'd say, you're not going to believe what they said to me, but they're not going to get away with this because da-da-da, and you did this to me, right?
	And that would be the Michelle Wolf response.
	But the Trump response is, okay, they've thrown this one at me.
	I'm going to detach myself a little bit.
	How can I? Oh, yeah, that's a funny joke.
	The wall just got 10 feet higher.
	It goes right out, and that's why it's funny.
	The Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, ran a trollish headline today because her performance is basically being universally condemned, but they ran the headline.
	They said, Michelle Wolf got it just right.
	This is how the piece goes.
	That Wolf's performance was not normal for the correspondence dinner is a testament to its timeliness and necessity.
	Nothing is normal right now.
	So that's what, this is important comedy.
	That's what this is.
	It's not, we need to suspend the rules because it isn't normal.
	This isn't, stop it, this isn't.
	Normal.
	This is why left-wing comedy is so insufferable.
	They're all doing this.
	They're doing this important comedy.
	So, you know, if the purpose of comedy is to make people laugh, then they'll keep that in mind.
	But they say, no, these aren't normal times we have to suspend all the rules.
	No, you don't.
	You don't have to suspend all the rules.
	You're in this vacuum.
	Your vision is so warped by your own hatred of Donald Trump that you don't realize the rules of comedy still apply.
	And so you might find catharsis in her saying mean things about Trump.
	That's not comedy.
	Let's get to Michelle Wolf herself to compare.
	So the woman who introduced her said, Michelle Wolf is not a political comedian by trade, and that is obviously true.
	She clearly isn't.
	It's why she bombed it so badly.
	Here's how Michelle Wolf opens.
	Like a porn star says when she's about to have sex with a Trump, let's get this over with.
	Yep, kiddos, this is here getting tonight.
	I'm going to skip a lot of the normal pleasantries.
	We're at a Hilton.
	It's not nice.
	This is on C-SPAN. No one watches that.
	Trump is president.
	It's not ideal.
	White House Corsets Bond Association, thank you for having me.
	The monkfish was fine.
	So that's how she opens.
	She opens up with this very easy joke about a porn star.
	And referring to Trump, just Trump.
	Not President Trump.
	Not the sitting president.
	Just Trump.
	It immediately begins with disrespect and an easy joke.
	A joke that anybody could make.
	And she addresses that.
	She said, this is not going to be nice.
	Everything about this is not nice.
	Right now, it's supposed to be this glitzy affair.
	Black tie, you know, these journalists get to go out for a night and pretend that they're movie stars or celebrities there.
	So it is supposed to be elevated and a little glamorous.
	That's been the way it's been for decades and decades.
	It's a charity dinner.
	But she says, no, this ain't going to be nice.
	I'm going to make this unpleasant and tense and debased and ugly and just bleh.
	And so you already know where she's coming from.
	She's not coming from a healthy place.
	She's not coming from the kind of place where you would laugh and tell jokes.
	She's saying, this is a miserable time and you're going to be miserable with me.
	I identified 48 statements that she intended to be jokes.
	Because I watched the whole thing, I watched it, there was parts of it a few times, and I was able to identify 48 lines that she would probably call jokes.
	They weren't quite jokes.
	I say that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a joke is a thing that someone says to cause amusement or laughter, especially a story with a funny punchline.
	Now, forget that these didn't really have punchlines, a lot of them.
	A lot of the statements were just statements.
	They weren't...
	They weren't intended to make people laugh.
	Maybe she wanted people to laugh, but they didn't follow the arc of what an actual joke is.
	So she'd say, so-and-so lies and is a liar.
	So-and-so is a disappointment to women.
	She used that line a bunch.
	Said, yeah, Ivanka Trump is a disappointment to women.
	But that isn't a joke.
	That's just an insult.
	But it's not insult comedy.
	It's just...
	That's what you think.
	Okay, that's fine.
	So, regardless, I wanted to include that because that's 48 statements that might have been intended to be jokes.
	A full 22 of them were just about genitals, and a 23rd flew directly from the genital to the scatological.
	So, 23 are occurring below the waist, and 22 were just about genitals.
	I'm actually surprised she did this because this sort of thing is a parody of bad female comedy.
	This is what you get from Amy Schumer when she's not stealing other people's jokes and Sarah Silverman.
	It's the easiest, grossest comedy that usually people don't really laugh at.
	South Park perfectly skewered this sort of fake comedy.
	Hey, girls are funny, Wendy.
	Okay?
	Get over it.
	Just do women's comedy stuff.
	You know, talk about how fat you are and how you want to have sex with guys and then say, my vagina a lot.
	That is it.
	Trey Parker and Matt Stone are making fun of the Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman kind of comedy because that isn't funny.
	I suppose they think it's funny because it's incongruous, right?
	They're playing on an incongruity.
	So they say, well, women are perceived as being very feminine and nice and pleasant and graceful, and we're going to be explicit and vulgar and materialistic and profane.
	But the thing is, that only works once.
	That only works in the 80s.
	It doesn't work when the norm for women is feminism.
	When the gracefulness and the femininity has all gone out the window for decades, then it's not funny anymore.
	It's just that's the way it is, right?
	That's sure.
	And now everything that Michelle Wolfe did was extremely vulgar.
	So, F-words, explicit genital references, pretty raunchy general references.
	That's not to say that you can't do those things.
	You can talk like a sailor sometimes or make jokes about genitals or whatever, but there is a time and a place for that.
	As I say, there's a time and a place for everything, and that's college.
	But there are times and places for this, right?
	So they'll say, well, Trump said gross things.
	He talked about genitals and made jokes about genitals.
	Right.
	He didn't do that on a podium at a black tie affair.
	He didn't even brag about it or do it in public.
	He defended those statements as locker room talk because they were locker room talk.
	Because he thought he was having a private conversation with a guy, the sort of conversation that every guy has.
	Sorry to tell you, ladies.
	Whatever little feminist guy is telling you, I've never said anything like that.
	I've never said anything.
	Like, run away.
	Because those are the creepy guys that are convincing you that they're nice and sensitive and feminists, and they are the creepiest of all.
	Those are the Aziz Ansari types.
	Owen and I were discussing that.
	I think Owen uses the word soy boy.
	Run away from that, because that's locker room talk.
	But there's a difference between locker room talk and glitzy Washington affairs.
	You've got to read the room.
	You've got to read your crowd.
	And also, you've all been criticizing Trump for saying those things.
	So now you can't do it.
	You've been saying, oh, so it's the worst thing and he did that.
	And yeah, it's great for her to do it because he did it.
	What?
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Also, it's so easy to go blue in comedy.
	It's so easy to just cheat at comedy by using swear words and raunchiness as a crutch.
	It's much easier to do that than to try to do jokes without that.
	Jerry Seinfeld talks about this.
	Norm MacDonald talks about this.
	It's much harder to be funny without that crutch.
	She wasn't even playing on anything else.
	It was just raunchiness and bad words.
	If you took all of that out, there wouldn't be any words left.
	There wouldn't be any...
	And it also isn't subversive.
	So the idea is I'm going to, that's the whole thing of like women talking about their genitals is I'm going to be subversive.
	But that isn't subversive.
	That's the way comedy is now.
	That's the baseline.
	That's the way society is.
	You hear it on network television.
	You hear little kids using terrible words in front of their parents.
	Little kids always use terrible words.
	They used to do it not in front of their parents.
	Right now, going clean is subversive.
	So there was a great, again, I always bring up Norm because he's the best living comedian.
	And Norm MacDonald was invited to one of these Comedy Central roasts for Bob Saget.
	And all of these roasts, it was the same thing as this, just how do you say the raunchiest, grossest thing with the most F-words?
	And so Norm decided, I'm going to be really subversive.
	By telling clean jokes from the Dean Martin roasts.
	So he'd say things like, you know, yeah, you know, your face looks like a flower, like a cauliflower.
	You know, and then Bill would say, oh, this is so shocking.
	This is so subversive.
	Now, the rest of the jokes, well, I'll have to wrap this up in a second.
	Say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
	But the rest of, I'll try to run through these quickly.
	The rest of them, Hillary ignored Michigan in the campaign.
	That was one of the premises.
	Ha ha.
	In another one, Michelle Wolfe called Trump a pussy.
	I can use it because they talk about the hats that way.
	And then she made a joke about how she can't grab him.
	She used the euphemism about pulling out of the Paris Agreement and how most men don't do that.
	Then one of her jokes just said, Trump is racist, xenophobic, Nazi, incompetent, and impotent.
	Just insults.
	She said, teachers don't need guns.
	That was one of the premises.
	She said, Mike Pence is awful, too.
	And so this was actually one of the best jokes of the night.
	She hit Mike Pence for being pro-life.
	That was the whole joke.
	And here's, I loved this joke.
	Here it is.
	Mike Pence is also very anti-choice.
	He 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 gotta get that baby out of there.
	And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want.
	I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion.
	You know, unless it's the one you got for your secret mistress.
	It's fun how values can waver.
	But good for you.
	This was probably her best joke of the night.
	One of two that were passably funny.
	And the reason, it's not that this joke was terribly funny.
	It was pretty horrifying.
	It would have been funny if it weren't such a horrifying image that it kind of overwhelmed the comedy of it.
	But, and obviously she didn't get the room.
	This was a totally inappropriate joke for an event like this.
	But it was pretty good because it killed all of the pro-abortion arguments.
	It actually did.
	It sort of got to the issue.
	For instance, she admitted that the baby is a baby.
	She said, you've got to knock it because you've got to get that baby out of there.
	She is saying, look, abortion is when you kill a baby in the womb and get rid of it.
	And she's following that to its logical conclusion.
	So that is truthful.
	She's kind of playing on truth.
	It's so horrifying it wasn't totally funny, but it was probably the closest thing to a joke she had all night.
	She doesn't totally get the issue, but...
	You know, Jonathan Haidt did that study that shows that conservatives understand the left.
	The left doesn't understand the right terribly well.
	And then all the rest of the jokes were about sex, you know.
	She talked about how she worked at Bear Stearns, so she's never been harassed, but she got effed.
	Easy jokes like that.
	One kind of funny one about Mika and Joe.
	Excuse me, Mika and Joe, where she said Mika and Joe on Morning Joe on MSNBC. It's always nice when a Me Too works out.
	It's kind of funny.
	And the rest, just total insults against other media personalities.
	So it doesn't have to be this way.
	The reason the shtick bombed is because she's so angry.
	She hates Trump.
	She hates the Trump administration.
	She hates the media.
	And so she would just call them liars.
	But calling someone a liar isn't a joke.
	And the premises, other than the abortion one, just weren't true.
	She had a joke about Starbucks, and the premise was that Starbucks isn't doing enough to stop racial discrimination.
	The real joke is that Starbucks is the most hippy-dippy, bleeding-heart place on Earth, and...
	It isn't the Jim Crow South.
	That would be the actual joke.
	It was so disconnected from reality.
	We will get into how it wasn't always like this and how to get comedy back and my PragerU video.
	But I've got to say goodbye.
	I'm sorry.
	To Facebook and YouTube.
	You can find this show on...
	On iTunes, on Stitcher, on Google, on Facebook, on YouTube, on MySpace, on Zanga, on LiveJournal.
	I think you can get it on AOL Instant Messenger still if you text that chatbot.
	I don't know.
	It's in a lot of places.
	Go check it out.
	Go to dailywire.com right now for the rest of the show.
	You're really going to want to watch this and the PragerU video.
	But it's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
	You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan Show, you get the Ben Shapiro Show.
	You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
	Get them in.
	That'll be on Thursday.
	You'll get to ask questions in the conversation.
	Next one coming up, little old me.
	Go to the Daily Wire right now.
	None of that matters.
	This is what matters.
	This is what really matters.
	Because, listen, I'm not willing...
	When you sip a delicious ambrosia, you don't always want to switch.
	And right now I'm on the Kanye West Vintage 2018.
	For when Kanye West, the biggest pop star in the world, decided that he was going to start saying extremely conservative Republican things on Twitter and the tears are still flowing.
	Thank goodness I brought this home over the weekend so that I could survive.
	Some of my colleagues, sorry to say they perished.
	They didn't bring their leftist tears tumblers home.
	Sorry.
	Don't be like them.
	Don't be like them.
	Don't be caught unawares.
	You don't know the day or the hour when leftist tears will drown you in their salty deliciousness.
	Go to dailywire.com.
	We'll be right back.
	So it wasn't always like this.
	It wasn't always this vulgar and this crass and this gross, you know.
	It wasn't always this disconnected from reality at these dinners.
	I couldn't find a clip of performers at these dinners because they don't really have them available until recently.
	But here's a clip of President Kennedy from the 1962 White House Correspondents' Dinner.
	Here's just an idea of how it used to be.
	Like members of Congress, I have been, during the last few days over the Easter holiday, back in touch with my constituents, and seeing how they felt.
	And frankly, I've come back to Washington from Palm Beach, and I'm against my entire program.
	Would you?
	So it's kind of funny too, because he, John F. Kennedy's vacation home, one of his was right near Donald Trump's.
	He would go down to Palm Beach a lot.
	Maybe he went to Mar-a-Lago, who knows.
	But it's just nicer.
	The Oscars used to be nicer, too.
	The awards shows used to be nicer.
	Because there was something called glamour.
	And people say all the time, they say, I miss it when politics was civil.
	I hate Donald Trump because he's not civil.
	Our politicians aren't civil.
	If you want the politics to be civil, the culture has to be civil.
	If you want the culture to be civil, you have to be civil.
	You have to comport yourself with dignity and integrity and not be screaming and yelling and profane all the time.
	You know, people can say, they tweet out or they put on Facebook, you know, I effing hate this stupid whatever Michelle Wolfe.
	You You're part of the problem, pal.
	That's not the sort of thing.
	It is degrading to swear frequently in public.
	That's not something...
	If you want things to be civil and nice, you have to behave in a nice and civil way.
	Roger Kimball, who is...
	One of the great observers of culture, he got this exactly right at American Greatness.
	He wrote, quote, The idea that there is certain conduct unbecoming a lady is anathema to Michelle Wolfe.
	On the contrary, she wears her vulgarity like a badge of honor, happy to trade an hour of embarrassed titters for a lifetime of dishonor.
	And that's exactly right.
	You go up and you say, I'm going to get the applause of the crowd for 15 minutes, and I will permanently degrade myself.
	I will permanently be that woman who did those disgusting things.
	You know, that woman whose parents probably aren't very proud of that display, but I got the titters of the crowd for an hour.
	That...
	Not a good way to go through life.
	Comedy doesn't have to be debasing.
	It can be witty.
	It can be nice.
	It can be John F. Kennedy.
	It can be Bob Hope.
	It can be plenty of good comedians.
	It can be Woody Allen, for that matter.
	But when it becomes vile and mean and angry, not only is it debasing, and not only does it ruin the glamour and ruin the appeal of that entertainment, It isn't funny.
	It doesn't work.
	It actually works much better when the performer and the audience have dignity themselves.
	Okay, we've got...
	How many more minutes do we have?
	We've got to burn through these things, huh?
	I've got...
	All right.
	Well, I really want to talk about Cecile Richards and why I'm going to miss her, but I'll abbreviate it.
	Cecile Richards, it's her last day of Planned Parenthood.
	She's a total ghoul, but she's strengthened the pro-life movement.
	She did.
	We have a great debt of gratitude to her.
	Her bloodlust increased abortions at Planned Parenthood.
	Absolutely true.
	But nationally, abortions decreased.
	In 2014, abortion hit a historic low in America.
	Fewer than a million abortions.
	I know that sounds terrible.
	That's not like damning with faint praise.
	But that's the right direction to be going down.
	It's her last day there.
	She made the goals of Planned Parenthood pretty clear.
	She was there to murder babies.
	That's her job.
	And she took her job very seriously.
	She did her job very well.
	But we saw a lot of things come out of that tenure.
	There were those undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress that showed members of Planned Parenthood, executives of Planned Parenthood, haggling over how much they could get for selling baby parts and organs and limbs, illegally selling them.
	They were haggling over numbers.
	And so I'm gonna miss her.
	I mean, she showed Planned Parenthood for what it is.
	And I hope the next person can be so cartoonishly ghoulish.
	And I wish Cecile Richards a nice time for the rest of her days on Earth before an eternity of hellfire awaits her.
	Okay, I've got a PragerU video out today.
	This is about how the left uses language and how they destroy language.
	So I'll just play a little clip of it.
	And you've got to go over and see it.
	You've got to share it.
	And really, You've got to send it to Kanye West.
	Here is the video.
	What's in a word?
	Why does it matter whether we call someone who breaks the law to enter the country an illegal alien or an undocumented immigrant?
	What's the difference between a Christmas tree and a holiday tree?
	It's just semantics, right?
	And no.
	It is just semantics.
	But semantics means the meaning of words.
	Words exist so that we might discriminate one thing from another.
	Without words, we have chaos.
	And it starts with the first words.
	A baby says mama to distinguish mommy from daddy.
	Words shape how we think.
	They color how we view the world.
	No one understands this better than the left.
	They are the masters of words, because they know that words matter.
	The left has a special gift for euphemisms.
	Soft words selected to sugarcoat harsh realities so as to make those harsh realities easier for us to swallow.
	But these soft words are insidious.
	So there's a lot more, and if you aren't watching right now, if you're not a subscriber, the artwork is phenomenal on this video.
	They did an incredible job on the artwork.
	Some people pointed out when they talk about swallowing soft words that Democrats give you, it's a little blue pill.
	So Well done on that little Easter egg.
	The video goes on for, I think, another four minutes or so.
	But it's so important.
	It's this subtle point that a lot of people ignore because it's so easy to get wrapped up in the language of the left.
	But language is where the battles are won.
	It's where the culture is won.
	It's where the politics is won.
	The difference between a Christmas tree and a holiday tree is night and day.
	The difference between an undocumented worker or a future American or a refugee asylum seeker and an illegal alien, that is night and day.
	It totally shapes how we think about subjects.
	So please go over there because really all I want is for Kanye West to tweet this video.
	He's so close.
	He's hanging out with Candace Owens.
	He's watching Jordan Peterson videos.
	He's watching Scott Adams.
	And it's just the perfect moment.
	I think if we can get this in front of Kanye, it'll be over.
	He'll never take that MAGA hat off.
	So please tweet it at him and send it to him.
	And I hope you enjoy the video.
	Let me know what you think about it.
	Okay, that's our show.
	We'll just have to get to the rest of the news tomorrow.
	Until then, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	I'll see you tomorrow.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
	Supervising producer Mathis Glover.
	Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

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