While some of Washington’s most revered journalists were being roasted by The Daily Show‘s Hasan Minhaj at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a different (though no less distinguished) crowd gathered at another D.C. hotel to join Full Frontal host Samantha Bee for the first “Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”
As expected, Bee’s dinner was full of the biting, unapologetically feminist snark that sets her weekly TBS show apart from her late-night contemporaries, all while celebrating a free press (“while we still have one”) and raising money for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Bee and the Full Frontal crew had plenty of jabs ready for President Trump, but the most ominous portion of the evening channeled Margaret Atwood with some terrifying speculative fiction about what next year’s Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner might look like—with current Vice President Mike Pence serving as commander-in-chief after Trump gets his head stuck in a honey jar. (Hey, as Minhaj noted at the other dinner, anything’s possible in Trump’s America, right?)
The segment aired at the end of the night and wrapped a multi-part feature imagining Bee roasting several former presidents in period-appropriate attire. The “2018” clip depicts a modern American theocracy, where women must request “a rare exception to the No Public Woman Chatter Law.”
In character, Bee admits that she “didn’t think Mike Pence would make a good president at all,” but that, after a disastrous year of Trump, she’s says coming around. “So in at least this case, the conversion therapy is working,” Bee sighs, alluding to the former Congressman’s apparent support for “ex-gay” therapy.
Given Pence’s self-description as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” who recently made headlines for his faith-informed policy of not dining alone with a woman who isn’t his wife, Bee’s dark vision for the future doesn’t feel all that far-fetched.
Watch Bee roast “Future President Pence” in the clip below, or restart the segment from the beginning to see her take on FDR, JFK, Reagan, Nixon, and even Bill Clinton. The entire Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is available on Full Frontal‘s YouTube page.
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