Trevor Noah Stumbles Into Some Truth with Biden Jokes

BUCK: White House Correspondents’ Dinner, let me tell you, I went to it… Gosh, it was 10 years ago. I vaguely remember the year just because there may have been some Buck doing Gangnam Style at the BuzzFeed party. I don’t know. There could even be video of this that existed at one point. Do you even remember Gangnam Style? It was a phenomenon. The team here remembers. It was everywhere.

I think at one point… I think Psy was the name of the music act, right? And it was at one point the biggest YouTube video of all time or close to it. It was up there with like Katy Perry and… Anyway. Right? You guys let me know if I’m off. Anyway, it was the first to a billion views on YouTube. There you go. Producer Mark has got me. First to a billion views.

So I went to the correspondents’ dinner. I don’t even remember who I sat with or what I was doing there, and I just remember being really bored the whole time. The good news, though, it was so early in my career that no one had any idea who I was. I was working… I had just started at The Blaze, TheBlaze.com at the time as a writer, and so I got to just be there and almost like sink into the background or the wall.

No one had any idea — and this boring. I don’t know. You get to sit there and hear a bunch of libs congratulate each other on, “Oh, we’re doing journalism. We’re so brave!” Trevor Noah was emceeing it this year, and I am fair to comedy, and there were some decent jokes that I saw made. Look, I cannot tell a lie. All right? I will not lie. There were some decent jokes that were made.

Here was one that didn’t really land as well they wanted ’cause people are not pleased with the economy and don’t really find the price of everything to be humorous. So this goes into the… I don’t know if this was the right direction for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner of fancy people.

BUCK: Everything is up, and we’ll talk more later, I think, about the price of fertilizer, which is one of those things that doesn’t seem necessarily — you hear that you go, “Oh, price of fertilizer.” Yeah, it’s food production. And food production globally is gonna be in a very different spot. You’re gonna see prices go up dramatically.

One thing that very few people were talking about in the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war was how much grain comes out of specifically Ukraine. Ukraine was always — and this even goes back to the Soviet Union era and before that — the breadbasket, if you will, of, well, then the Soviet Union and before that the various states that came before it.

And now you have obviously a dramatic lessening of production of grain coming out of the country. You also have far less fertilizer coming out of Russia, even though I don’t believe… Fertilizer is not one of the things that is on the banned list, but the Russians are just producing less, they’re sending less, and that means the price of all of that is going up.

Which means your food’s about to get a whole lot more expensive. So maybe I am talking about fertilizer now. Come back to this a bit later. But the Biden administration is completely incapable of coming up with any strategic solutions to these things. And even Trevor Noah, who I will say is a generally…

He has pretty much destroyed The Daily Show as something that is culturally relevant. I mean, I know there’s some people who watch it, but it’s not funny, he’s not very funny, it’s not very good, and he even feels that there are jokes to be made about Biden’s ability to get things done.

BUCK: I mean, there’s truth there. The reason — you could tell some people are groaning a little bit, but it’s true. Do you remember how much you heard about Build Back Better? (impression) “Gonna be great, no joke, it’s gonna work. We’re gonna Build Back Better.” He would do this within keep saying this over and over again, “Jobs, world class jobs for the folks, you know, the folks with the jobs.”

You can see that Biden has been giving up the same folksy, rolled-up sleeves at the dinner table with you. He’s good old Joe from down the street. I mean, actually made, what, $17 million after he, like, finished being in the White House as VP, “Oh, yeah, he knows! He knows the struggle.” Guy’s been living on a senator’s salary for his whole life. He’s okay.

It hasn’t been that hard. But he was saying that Build Back Better was gonna change everything. Now what are we supposed to think about the fact that his own party, Senators Manchin and Sinema, prevented it from going through. There was a funny joke last night, actually, about how it was great for the journalists to all be gathered together in the same room with the most powerful man in the world, Joe Manchin, which was pretty amusing, I will say.

I will give them that. See, that’s the thing. There are occasionally they made some funny jokes. But overall, I don’t think the country is in a particularly amused mood right now. And I think that some of the jokes about things like the trajectory of the economy? Mmm-hmm. I also think that this notion of a White House Correspondents’ Dinner where they all sit around with the politicians they cover and we’re supposed to pretend that this is that this isn’t some club of people that all think the same things and are congratulating each other? I think that this is kind of gross, honestly. So not enough funny, not enough worthwhile.