Imitation and Satire at the <em>Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner</em>

WASHINGTON, D.C.—“Are you guys having an okay time? Are you drunk?”

Samantha Bee, on Saturday afternoon, was a few segments in to the comedic experiment she and her team at TBS had dubbed the Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Bee—energized by an all-woman punk band and surrounded by flags, podiums, columns, and other such symbolic decorations of the American presidency—was working the concert stage of the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, just down the street from the White House, where the president was not at the time because he was instead in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, staging his own alternative to the traditional Correspondents’ Dinner.

Bee’s crowd, it turned out, was having a more than okay time. They whooped in reply to theirwriter and correspondent Ashley Nicole Black took the stage for the first of her cameos in the show.