There’s a kind of idiocy about the way the White House Correspondents Dinner is, conceptually, a Feast of Fools with a comedian as Lord of Misrule, a night when decorum is suspended, comedy rules, etc.
And then D.C. never goes all-in. The crowd doesn’t laugh, and then there’s this post-mortem in which interested parties pull organs out of the comedy set and weigh them on political scales and try to make something out of them. The whole city should sign a disarmament pact or just stop doing this thing.
Of course, it really is a feast of fools, in the sense that uncomfortable truths are being spoken.
This hour, TV critic Eric Deggans and I talk about the comedian-in-chief and the poor guy who had to follow him.
Also this hour: West Hartford last year embraced a Chinese company seeking to open a Chinese Academy on the site of UConn's campus in West Hartford. Students attending the academy would ultimately land in the town's two high schools, paying thousands of dollars per student to the town as tuition. The town saw it as a good way to increase cultural diversity and hedge against future drops in enrollment and budgetary cuts. Now some are having second thoughts.
GUESTS:
- Eric Deggans - NPR's TV Critic and the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation
- Laura Krantz - Reporter for The Boston Globe
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Colin McEnroe and Greg Hill contributed to this show.
