On Saturday night, Matt and Mercedes Schlapp were shocked—shocked!—to find jokes at a comedy roast.
After host/comedian Michelle Wolf directed a few tame jokes at White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the conservative power couple—he the lord of CPAC, she the White House director of strategic communications—left the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in a huff, announcing the move via Twitter.
“My wife @mercedesschlapp and I walked out early from the wh correspondents dinner. Enough of elites mocking all of us,” tweeted Mr. S. “It’s why America hates the out of touch leftist media elite,” added Mrs. S.
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The New York Times later reported that the Schlapps, who recently closed on a $3 million home in Virginia, fired off those online missives “from a limousine en route to an exclusive after-party organized by NBC/MSNBC.”
At the NBC/MSNBC shindig, Mercedes is said to have confronted comedian Kathy Griffin, who attended the soiree as a guest of the LGBT publication Washington Blade.
“I guess because I’m me and a comic, she just comes up to me and starts giving me notes about how ‘appalling’ Michelle Wolf’s set was and telling me why she left,” Griffin recalls in an interview with The Daily Beast. “And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, who are you? What do you do?’ and then I saw her with her husband, and I was like, ‘Oh...’
“So she comes at me about Michelle’s set and I thought, all right, let’s go, and I told her: ‘Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a bully who bullies America every single day. She stands at the podium, she lies, she chips away at human rights and the First Amendment, and you know it.’ She wasn’t having any of that. She was like, ‘She’s not the bully, you’re the bully!’”
It took everything within Griffin to not escalate the situation further. “I did want to take off my earrings and my heels—like I’m on Maury and all ‘hold my heels’—but I said: ‘You are a horrible person. You’re horr-i-ble.’ She may have said something to me on her way out, I don’t remember.”
Earlier in the evening, it was Griffin who called out a series of current and former Trump administration officials at the Correspondents’ Dinner—starting with Jason Miller, who was announced as Trump’s White House communications director during the transition but withdrew from the position after news emerged that he impregnated his mistress, A.J. Delgado, a fellow Trump campaign staffer.
“The guy who knocked up A.J. Delgado and she of course got fired, and then he got re-hired [by CNN],” offers Griffin, shaking her head in frustration. “So I’m confronting Jason Miller about the love child—and also just being a piece of shit asshole, and asking him basic questions like, ‘How can you sleep at night?’ ‘What’s it like being a propagandist?’ It’s so funny when these guys try to do a comeback. They just stammer or go ‘you’re ugly,’ because that’s all they have.”
Next in line for Griffin’s ire was Hogan Gidley, the White House deputy press secretary. “I call him ‘Hoagy Carmichael,’” Griffin says, flashing a smile. “He walked past the table… and I just couldn’t resist. I said, ‘Hey, how do you sleep at night?’ and he goes, ‘Oh, I sleep like a baby.’ I go, ‘I doubt it. But why don’t you blow me, right now.’”
Gidley, who was cradling a can of Tecate beer, pointed to it and said, “Look, I have a Mexican beer—before we build the wall and you can’t get these anymore,” remembers Griffin. “So I said, ‘You’re not gonna build that wall, but I would like you to finish blowing me.’ He then stammered, and I told him to ‘fuck off.’ He wasn’t even worth the time of a clever comeback.”
The one who got off easiest, it seems, was former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who was sitting at a nearby table. “That guy had some nerve to sit there at the next table with his pissy face. I’m looking at Sean Spicer, and I kept doing this thing”—Griffin mimics pointing her fingers at her eyes, and pointing them back at Spicer—“and saying, ‘Mueller Time.’ ‘Mueller Time.’ ‘Mueller Time.’”
She pauses. “I do not have a fuck left to give.”
Griffin is currently on tour. Our full interview with the embattled comedian will run later this week.
