SNL’s Colin Jost to host 2024 White House correspondents’ dinner
Longtime “Saturday Night Live” cast member Colin Jost has been tapped to host the next iteration of the White House correspondents’ dinner, where political journalists sit down with the president, members of Congress and Hollywood stars for a night of often regrettable jokes.
“Colin Jost knows how to make Saturday nights funny,” White House Correspondents’ Association president Kelly O’Donnell said in a statement announcing the April 27 dinner. “His sharp insights perfectly meet this remarkable time of divided politics, and a presidential campaign careening toward a rematch.”
Jost joined SNL as a writer in 2005 and has co-hosted the comedy show’s satirical news broadcast, “Weekend Update,” since 2014.
Like the dinner’s two most recent hosts, comedians Roy Wood Jr. and Trevor Noah, he’ll be expected to deliver a series of topically on-the-nose one-liners that lightly skewer his audience. (Wood in 2023, for example: “George [Santos] couldn’t be here tonight. He’s auditioning for ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’”)
Traditionally, the president takes the mic at some point and delivers a self-deprecating stand-up routine, as President Biden did last year. Trump pointedly refused to attend the dinner during his term (before the coronavirus pandemic put it on hiatus) because, as he put it, “the dinner is so boring and so negative.”
Trump was not alone in criticizing the event, ostensibly a fundraiser for the WHCA that dates to the 1920s. Former Post columnist Margaret Sullivan once called it “a glitzy party – now a week-long blitz of related parties – in which Washington, Hollywood and New York media types schmooze it up with the public officials that some of them are supposed to cover, while looking over their shoulders to see whether Helen Mirren is really looking as fabulous as everyone says.”
Defenders of the dinner say it offers the press corps and the officials they cover a rare opportunity to let their guards down and poke fun at each other. The main speeches of the evening are typically broadcast live on C-SPAN and other cable-news stations.
Jost’s “smart brand of comedy and keen observation will turn up the heat on the national news media and across the political spectrum,” O’Donnell said in the news release. “A night of laughs and reflections as our dinner honors freedom of the press as a cornerstone of American democracy.”