Closing the barb-filled spiel with a more heartfelt reflection on the significance of having a black president, Wilmore ended the speech with a tribute to President Barack Obama: “Yo Barry, you did it, my, my (n-word)”.
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The White House defended Wilmore’s use of the word, with spokesman Josh Earnest saying, “I’m confident that Mr. Wilmore used the word by design”.
Obama took the podium to Anna Kendrick‘s song “Cups”, which goes “you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone”.
“I think the first thing that I would observe is that any comedian who signed up to follow President Obama at the White House Correspondents dinner is assuming one of the most hard tasks in comedy, and just by nature of the engagement, that’s a tough job following the president of the United States”, said Earnest.
Even still, the president didn’t have any issues with the remark when the press secretary spoke to him May 2.
Wilmore’s usage of the perennially fraught “n-word” may have been controversial, but we shouldn’t let it overshadow his underlying message.
But the prospect of leaving the White House is a mixed bag. Of course, the big news was at the end of Wilmore’s speech, when he addressed the president saying, “You did it, my nigga”.
As President Barack Obama took the podium for the last time as president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he cracked many jokes and literally dropped the mic when he exited.
Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders weren’t above having their egos lacerated by Wilmore’s bombs either. Wilmore said he had called him a “n**ga”. He added, “That’s disgusting I would never do that….” Trump and his party’s two other competitor John Kasich and Ted Cruz did not attend the dinner.
Jezebel’s Aimee Lutkin described the event as “a roast presented to a crowd of people with no sense of humor”, and speculated that Wilmore’s racial jokes may not have landed in part because the overwhelmingly white crowd.
Another CNN correspondent, Don Lemon, gave Wilmore the finger when the comic said: “Some of America’s foremost black journalists are here tonight”.
“It’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n– in public”, Obama in a contemplative, hour-plus interview with comedian Marc Maron for his podcast, WTF.
At that point, the moment became surreal “because I knew I had a lot more material to go through, and it was going to be an unpredictable way ahead”.
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“Stop calling us that”, he pleaded. “Guests were asked to check whether they wanted steak or fish”, he told the diners, “and instead a whole bunch of you wrote in Paul Ryan”.
