How the White House correspondents' dinner lost its sense of humor

In the ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Saturday night, there will be tuxes hauled from the backs of closets and an entree with the texture of a dish sponge. There will be tipsy journalists and cocktail-party chatter.

But the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an annual rite of spring that has blossomed since the 1920s as reliably as Washington’s cherry trees, will lack a few of its essential features. Most notably, the president: Donald Trump, for the third year straight, turned down the invitation by the reporters who cover him, making him the first commander in chief since Ronald Reagan to not attend, who missed the event because he had been shot weeks before.

There won’t be celebrities, either. The fizzy, too-beautiful Hollywood imports who have leavened the wonky crowd for decades have mostly stayed away from the dinner since Trump took office.

The last element of the dinner’s creaky traditions to be stripped away this weekend? Laughter.

The dinner has long featured a professional comedian slinging jokes about the assembled journalists, administration types and the president. The president usually takes to the dais to give as good as he gets, roasting the journalists who cover him and inflicting a few self-deprecating zingers.

SiriusXM chief Washington correspondent Olivier Knox, as the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, was the one in charge of selecting this year’s entertainment. And he fully takes the blame — or credit, depending on one’s perspective — for dulling the dinner down. “I felt that the dinner needed a reset,” he said, explaining his choice for the evening’s keynote — not a hot stand-up act or “Saturday Night Live” cast member, but esteemed historian and biographer Ron Chernow, whose claim to pop-culture relevance is his 800-plus-page biography of Alexander Hamilton that was the basis for the hip-hop Broadway juggernaut “Hamilton.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner-lost-its-sense-of-humor/ar-BBWhqwj?li=BBnb4R7

Basically we have a president who can dish shit out but can't take it.