SUNDAY
10 AM
You ever go out to dinner one night and suffer for it?
You order the chicken curry extra-hot, for example, and it turns out that back in the kitchen they took you at you word. Or maybe you made a special request for habanera peppers, so when they brought you an entire dish of em, you felt obliged to eat them. All.
Something like that ever happen to you?
Then you might understand why the White House Correspondents Association booked impressionist Rich Little -- as entertainers go, just a big ol' bowl of warm oatmeal -- as headliner for this year s annual dinner.
You remember Rich Little. He was that guy who did a really good Richard Nixon imitation.
Sometimes, after dinner, your whole family would gather round the TV in the rumpus room to watch The Ed Sullivan Show, and Rich Little would come on and make your parents laugh really hard (even though they belonged to the Straight-Ticket Republican Voters club).
A guy who could do a spot-on imitation of Tricky Dick during the Vietnam years was pretty funny. But 30 years can really smooth off whatever rough edges might have remained.
Because I have no actual life to speak of, I found myself parked in front of the TV last night, watching the WH Correspondents s dinner live on C-Span.
(Somewhere, someone must be starting a charity to benefit people like me.)
Now, remember: Last year, the dinner featured Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert. If you missed it, believe me when I tell you that the guy who invented the word truthy did not go easy on a president who always seemed to suffer a truthiness shortage whenever it came to explaining his Iraq War.
When Colbert performed at the 2006 dinner, he targeted not just the president (who was visibly frosty throughout), but the obedience-trained Washington mainstream media types (who were not, repeat, not happy to be thus skwered).
Welcome, Rich Little, to the 2007 White House Correspondents Dinner!
Last night in D.C. must have been sort of like sitting through Thanksgiving dinner with your Great Uncle Horace, who never forgot that he once took second place at the local Komedy Kut-Ups! open-mic night back in 1973.
People, Rich Little did impressions of CBS Resident Curmudgeon Andy Rooney (age: 167) and Johnny Carson (beloved, but clearly of another generation). Does that give you any better idea of how far behind the curve this dinner was?
It was a Philco event in the age of YouTube.
Singe, don t burn.
That was the entertainment mandate of this year s dinner, but someone went overboard and threw water on the matches. There was no fire at all last night. Not a single spark.
In the end, the very toothlessness of the evening seemed wholly and appropriately symbolic of a dozing Washington press corp s eagerness not to offend.
First Published April 22, 2007, 2:40 p.m.