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Michelle Wolf knows how a low-stakes news cycle works. It typically starts with an event, the backlash and discourse unfold, and after a while, everyone eventually moves on. After her appearance at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the comedian figured this was the course it would take and was content with moving on. But when then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the target of one of her joke’s that night, revived the conversation in her memoir, Wolf figured she might as well crack open her own vault of reflections on the event and even more jokes in case the first batch didn’t floor her audience enough.
On April 24 at 8 p.m. EST, Wolf will release Dinner Time, a 15-minute set she filmed three years ago, exclusively on Punchup. The special will look back on her Correspondents’ Dinner speech, which riled up the Fox News crowd and struck a nerve with Donald Trump. Earlier this month, the White House Correspondents Association announced that the annual dinner will no longer feature a comedian. Amber Ruffin was originally scheduled to host the event.
“There might not be a comedian at the Correspondents’ Dinner this year, but the good news is: I have some leftovers,” Wolf said. “I’ve been holding onto this set since 2022, and with everything going on, now felt like the right moment to share it.”
In the Dinner Time trailer, the comedian said the only reason she appeared at the dinner in the first place was “because I love to write jokes and I thought it’d be very fun to write jokes about those people and then tell it to their faces.” These jokes included roasting Sanders’ morals but complimenting her makeup (“I think she’s very resourceful. Like, she burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye”) and Kellyanne Conway’s Pinocchio-like ways (“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 get hurt, just stuck.”).
That could have been the end of it. “I was never going to talk about the Correspondents’ Dinner ever again,” Wolf said. “I thought it was aging really well. But then Sarah Sanders wrote a book, and she talked about it, and I was like, well, if you’re going to talk about…” Sanders included a passage about the event in her 2020 memoir, Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House, writing: “I debated walking out or perhaps even throwing my wineglass at her. But ultimately, I stayed in my seat and held my head high.”
Wolf’s jokes about Sanders were slammed as “filthy” and “incredibly disrespectful,” per the news broadcast clips included in the trailer. “I made a fat joke about Chris Christie — you’re not even supposed to be able to make fat jokes,” she said. “No one got mad at me for that one. And I’ll tell you what it is if you promise to keep it a secret.”
