Sarah Huckabee Sanders has fired back at Michelle Wolf after her biting comments at the White House Correspondents Dinner speech.
The White House press secretary was appearing on Fox & Friends after the uproar over Wolf’s comments, including that Sanders ‘burns facts and uses the ash to create a perfect smokey eye.’
‘That evening says a whole lot more about her than it does about me,’ Sanders hit back on Thursday.
‘I hope that [Wolf] can find some of the same happiness that we all have, because I think she may need a little bit more of that in her life because the rest of us here are doing great,’ she added.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders has fired back at Michelle Wolf after her biting comments at the White House Correspondents Dinner speech
Sanders added that she was putting the comments behind her and just carrying on with the job in hand.
‘The people that were my friends before that evening are my friends today. I’m going to continue doing the job that I came here to do,’ said Sanders.
Wolf has spoken out to defend her controversial White House Correspondents Dinner speech following angry backlash.
The comedian has been under fire by both the Left and Right for her jokes at the annual dinner on Saturday. The president of the White House Correspondents Association, which put on the event, even publicly disavowed Wolf, saying her speech was ‘not in the spirit’ of the group’s mission.
However, Wolf said she doesn’t regret any of her comments.
‘I mean, I’m honestly – I wouldn’t change a single word that I said. I’m very happy with what I said, and I’m glad I stuck to my guns,’ Wolf said on the Fresh Air radio program in an interview recorded Monday.
Michelle Wolf spoke about her headline-making White House Correspondents Dinner speech in an interview on Fresh Air. Above, Wolf during the speech on Saturday above
Even still, Wolf said she ‘wasn’t expecting this level’ of rebuke.
‘But I’m also not disappointed there’s this level. I knew what I was doing going in. I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want to cater to the room. I wanted to cater to the outside audience, and not betray my brand of comedy,’ she said.
Looking back at previous WHCD speeches, she says the comedian usually makes fun of everyone in the room. But she says she doesn’t think that makes sense anymore, now that Trump refuses to attend.
‘I think a lot of it and what I’ve seen in the past is they poke little fun, they kind of poke fun at deeper dives in news media. They’ll go kind of table by table pointing at people and making fun of them, in a way that I think used to be fun because the dinner used to have the president there, it used to be we’re all poking fun of each other, the president’s going to poke fun at us, we’re going to hit back.
‘Now it seems like it’s a much more serious environment and to kind of not go after the big issues and just have a little fun in the room seemed just not as exciting to me,’ she said.
One of the more awkward moments of the night was when Wolf joked about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, while the cameras were trained on the White House press secretary
Like many comedians who have performed at the dinner, Wolf explained why the room is so hard to crack.
‘I mean, it’s a large ballroom. The audience isn’t miked so you the laughs aren’t very audible in general.
‘But it’s also, it’s formal, which people don’t laugh as much when they’re dressed up. There’s round tables and people are eating or drinking, so by the virtue of a round table people are partially turned away from you.
‘And it’s televised and there are all these people that may or may not be able to show genuine reactions and so you’re constantly thinking ‘I need to react in a way that will come off well on TV,” Wolf explained.
Wolf’s speech upset both the left and right, but she says she wouldn’t change a single word
When former White House press secretary Sean Spicer called the speech a ‘disgrace,’ on Twitter over the weekend, Wolf responded ‘Thank you!’
At one point in the evening, when the crowd gasped at a joke she made about the pink hats worn at the Women’s March, Wolf said ‘You should’ve done more research before you got me to do this.’
When asked about that moment, Wolf said she thinks that because she’s a woman, they thought she would have gone easy on the crowd of journalists and the members of the Trump administration who attended.
‘I don’t know, maybe I’m projecting this, but I think sometimes they look at a woman and they think ‘Oh, she’ll be nice,’ and if you’ve seen any of my comedy you know that I don’t – I’m not. I don’t pull punches. I’m not afraid to talk about things.
‘And I don’t think they expected that from me. I think they still have preconceived notions of how women will present themselves and I don’t fit in that box,’ she said.
One of the more awkward parts of the night was when Wolf made a joke about White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, while cameras were trained on Sanders herself, who looked upset.
The White House Correspondents Association president later disavowed the speech, saying it wasn’t ‘in the spirit’ of their mission. Wolf responded to those comments on her Instagram
Wolf’s blistering critique of Sanders mocked everything from her truthfulness to her Southern roots, and she also noted the press secretary’s eye makeup.
‘I have to say I’m a little star-struck, I loved you as Aunt Lydia in A Handmaid’s Tale. Mike Pence, if you haven’t seen it you would love it,’ Wolf said as she turned to Sanders.
‘I like Sarah, I think she’s really resourceful. She burns facts and uses the ash to create a perfect smokey eye,’ she said. ‘Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies.
‘I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Is it Sarah Sanders? Is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders? Is it Cousin Huckabee? Is it Aunt Huckabee Sanders?’
‘What’s ‘Uncle Tom’ but for white women who disappoint other white women? Ah, I know! Aunt Coulter!’
The comments were met by a stony look from Sanders, and were criticized by others including President Donald Trump who said the ‘filthy ‘comedian’ totally bombed’ in her racy monologue as he said the annual dinner was a failure and ‘dead as we know it’.
But Wolf has hit back at some of those who criticized her, saying she never attacked Sanders’ physical appearance during her remarks in which she compared her to The Handmaid’s Tale character Aunt Lydia who is an enslaver of women.
She tweeted: ‘Why are you guys making this about Sarah’s looks? I said she burns facts and uses the ash to create a *perfect* smoky eye. I complimented her eye makeup and her ingenuity of materials.’
‘All these jokes were about her despicable behavior. Sounds like you have some thoughts about her looks though?’ Wolf tweeted.
Wolf thinks that’s evidence of a double standard.
‘I mean, if there is two people that I actually made fun of their looks on Saturday it was Mitch McConnell and Chris Christie and no one is jumping to their defense. I made fun of Mitch McConnell’s neck and I did a small jab at Chris Christie’s weight and no one is jumping to their defense,’ she said.
Wolf added that Sanders was a poor sport for most of the night, refusing to stand up and applaud when awards were handed out.
She added that ‘having the ability to laugh at yourself is important’.
‘You know, there’s plenty where you could look back and the camera was on Obama when people were making pretty aggressive jokes about Obama and he was laughing. And I think having the ability to laugh at yourself is important,’ she said.