Obama's Correspondents’ Dinner Monologue Has a Thousand Fathers and Mothers
US President Barack Obama speaks at the annual White House Correspondent's Association Gala at the Washington Hilton hotel May 3, 2014 in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty ImagesIf there's a comedy equivalent to the "nuclear football," the suitcase with the launch codes, it's a worn gray folder marked "Presidential Statement" that lives in the bowels of the White House, in the speechwriters' suite, and was delivered to the President Barack Obama last night. Inside that folder is a well-guarded arsenal of jokes, roughly 1,100-words, that will come together as the president's monologue for Saturday night's White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Preventing the president from bombing at the dinner is a fully nationalized effort, involving aides past and present as well as a task force of comedic luminaries. This year, the month-long process leaned on Zach Galifianakis and other film and television comedians as well as White House lawyers, advisers, and cadre of former Obama aides, all coordinated by chief White House speechwriter Cody Keenan and his deputy and in-house funny man David Litt, who's the youthful point-man for the monologue. Litt and Keenan put the finishing touches on their draft Wednesday before sliding it into the folder and sending it upstairs to the leader of the free world. Litt, 28, a former intern at The Onion who honed his comedic skills in a Yale improv group, said there's something uniquely American about the tradition, especially the aspect of presidents poking fun at themselves. "Not every world leader would expose themselves like that."