Yeah, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner can be a little infuriating. Who can forget George W. Bush making jokes about never finding the WMDs that were the ginned up justification for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq? But then Stephen Colbert’s Bush roast in 2006 was absolutely amazing, one of the greatest nights of political comedy ever recorded. Larry Wilmore’s speech last night was a smart, pointed, hilarious takedown of the news media and how a certain portion of white America has basically lost its mind since a black president was elected almost a decade ago. Perhaps the White House Correspondents’ Association should limit the comedy to the actual comedians, and not let the elected leader of our country say or do anything that could possibly make light of some of the tragic and deadly decisions they have to make as part of their job?
But then, damn: Obama’s about as good as any comedian working today. We’ve watched eight of his WHCD speeches now, and we don’t know if we’d want to miss out on any of them. If he devoted his post-presidential career to biennial HBO hourlong stand-up specials, this would be a much better world. Maybe if he had taken that route from day one we wouldn’t be hearing about all these drone strikes and continued surveillance issues and everything else that’s taken the bloom off the Obama rose. Take a look above at his full speech from last night’s event, and imagine how good The Tonight Show Starring Barack Obama would be.