the importance of that is one of the main things that the night still stands for. i think president biden, he checked all of those boxes and did a really good job after as you heard him say, six years which with no president. it was blissfully short, i thought, especially for president biden, which i m sure was welcome for the audience. you know his team has been working on this speech for weeks. take us behind the scenes on what the prep is like for a moment like this. how do you blend the president s own sense of humor with all the ideas that i m sure you re fielding from in and outside the white house. the most important thing when you re writing jokes for politicians is that the joke is that it is the politician telling the joke, right? it is playing off that person s persona of their the day and the job they re doing, 365 days a year. i thought president biden s team did that very well. these were jokes that played off of who he was, they re clearly
trevor now. and trevor, the really good news is now you get to roast the president of the united states, and unlike in moscow, you won t go to jail. joining us now, someone who knows a thing or two about writing jokes for the president, david lit is here with me, a speechwriter for president obama and author of thanks obama my hopy changy white house years. how did he do? i thought he did very well, laura. thank you for having me on. i think in particular the if you think about the things that presidents traditionally do on a night like this, they need to show they can laugh at themselves, they need to show they can tell a joke or two, take a couple of shots that are in good fun, but maybe a little bit edgy at least for a president, and i think most importantly they need to show up and talk about the importance of a free press and i do think for all of the many elements of the correspondents dinner that are a little bit bizarre, acknowledging the free press and
unless it s omarosa. i m not surprised of him making a joke perceived as racist. david, i m going to return to one of these jokes here. mentioned a joke about melania trump, the first lady, during the course of the speech last night, reportedly from those at the speech. so many people have been leaving the white house. it s actually been really exciting and invigorating. i like turnover, i like chaos, it is good. now the question everyone keeps asking is, who s going to be the next to leave, steve miller or melania. reaction to that, as a joke, do you think it s a funny joke? second, when you re writing a speech like this, who do you decide who to target? let me start with my reaction just on a joke level, i don t think it makes a ton of sense because no one things steven miller is leaving the white house, so where s the joke? fair enough. stronger reaction is as a person, one of the things that when we were writing jokes for president obama, we would only write jokes that incl
he s just going to look them in the camera and say, isis, stop it. have you ever seen anything like this in another presidency? there s never been anything like this in a presidency. we ve never had this many late night people before, so we ve never had teams of 10 or 12 comedy writers all writing jokes about the same guy all the time. we went into the weekend worried about kim jong-un starting a war. we came out of it wondering if our president is cutting eye holes out of his bedsheets. how many late night hosts are members of the resistance? there s at least two overtly. colbert and seth meyers, to me they re like the voices of the resistance. basically their whole shows are about trump. i boldly said on this show it was a stunt and he would never really run. seth meyers was equally stunned on election night. he offered a mea culpa on late night the next day. based on this pattern of me being wrong on every one of my donald trump predictions, he s probably going to
stop it. have you ever seen anything like this in another presidency? there s never been anything like this in a presidency. we ve never had this many late night people before, so we ve never had teams of 10 or 12 comedy writers all writing jokes about the same guy all the time. we went into the weekend worried about kim joung eun starting a war. we came out of it wondering if our president is cutting eye holes out of his bedsheets. how many late night hosts are members of the resistance? there s at least two overtly. colbert and seth meyers, to me they re like the voices of the resistance. basically their whole shows are about trump. i boldly said on this show it was a stunt and he would never really run. seth meyers was equally stunned on election night. he offered a mea culpa on late night the next day. based on this pattern of me being wrong on every one of my donald trump predictions, he s probably going to be a great [ bleep ] president. then he gave the new pre