Obfuscated in these discussions was the fact that Wolf’s “ perfect smokey eye” line capped off a joke about Sanders’ constant, republic-endangering dishonesty to journalists and civilian audiences, rather than a misguided makeup choice. If the President of the United States and his policy-making cohort can’t gleefully critique women’s looks without backlash, they reasoned, then nobody should be able to. In the aftermath, instead of reporting on her quips about the political establishment’s “wavering values” on abortion, the ongoing Flint water crisis, or the actual, verbatim, “collapse of the republic,” pundits seized on Wolf’s jokes about Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup to illustrate the comedian’s feminist hypocrisy - and by extension, the hypocrisy of all liberals. She wasn’t just funny she was nuanced, creative and apparently fearless. She fought fire with fire, hurling digs at the expense of the right and left politicians and media blatantly racist gubernatorial candidates and “well-meaning” corporations doing damage control. But in Washington that night, unbound by advertisers or the FCC, she responded to the increasingly chaotic state of American politics and discourse with an appropriately confrontational monologue. Wolf’s previous appearances on The Daily Show hadn’t left much of an impression on me, I suspect due to the gag effect of cable TV standards on her most controversial jokes. This wasn’t hard to remember I’ve watched it at least three times in the wake of her incendiary remarks at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That’s the same thing she wore to tape Nice Lady.” Certainly because I’ve always been hyperfocused on clothes and in all likelihood because she is a woman, the first thing I thought as comedian Michelle Wolf walked onto the set of her new Netflix show The Break was: “Huh.
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