Conan O’Brien Entertains at White House Correspondents’ Dinner
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Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Conan O’Brien provided the entertainment for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night, pulling no punches in poking fun at President Obama, members of Congress and the media.
Early on in his speech, the TBS late-night host quipped, “When you think about it, the president and I are a lot alike. We both went to Harvard. We both have two children. And we both told Joe Biden we didn’t have extra tickets for tonight’s event.”
O’Brien later asked Obama, “It’s been several months since you were re-elected, sir, so I’m curious, why are you still sending everyone five emails a day asking for more money? You won. Do you have a gambling problem we don’t know about?”
And he didn’t stop there. He declared to Obama, “Your hair is so white, it could be a member of your cabinet.”
O’Brien took a couple of digs at Obama’s 2012 presidential opponent, Mitt Romney, too.
He joked, “If in 1995, you told me that in 2013, we’d have an African-American president with a middle name Hussein, who was just re-elected to a second term in a sluggish economy, I would have said, oh, he must have run against Mitt Romney.”
O’Brien, who famously had an ill-fated stint as host of The Tonight Show a few years ago, couldn’t resist taking a jab at the NBC program.
He said, “The president is hard at work creating jobs. Since he was first elected, the number of popes has doubled. The number of Tonight Show hosts has tripled.”
O’Brien also made numerous jokes at the expense of the print media as well as the major TV news networks.
At one point he remarked, “Fox News is watched by conservatives, MSNBC is watched by liberals. CNN is watched by the people who clean the offices at CNN.” He followed up by referring to CNN primetime host Piers Morgan, who’s British, as “one of the scheming footmen from Downton Abbey.”
In a serious moment, O’Brien, a native of Boston, thanked Obama for visiting the city in the aftermath of the bombings there earlier this month.
O’Brien previously headlined the event in 1995.
The gala opened with a spoof of Kevin Spacey’s Netflix series House of Cards. Spacey, reprising his role of a corrupt congressman, spoke with real-life politicians including Sen. John McCain, discussing seating arrangements and other issues regarding the dinner.
In another humorous video, Steven Spielberg revealed his latest project: a biopic on Obama, starring Oscar-winning Lincoln actor Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead role. Footage was then shown of Obama pretending to be Day-Lewis pretending to be Obama. 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan made a cameo to chat about his “performance” as Vice President Joe Biden.
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