The President and journalists exchange banter at the annual White House correspondents dinner traditionally, but the jokes at this year’s gathering on Saturday night had a grave undertone too as Donald Trump became the first commander-in-chief to skip it in 36 years. In 1981, Ronald Reagan who could not attend it following an assassination attempt, phoned in with jokes about the media.

"OK, we've got to address the elephant that's not in the room,” Indian American comedian Hasan Minhaj who was the main performer of the evening said about Mr. Trump’s absence. “….I think he's in Pennsylvania because he can't take a joke.” The event followed Mr. Trump’s address to supporters in Pennsylvania where he went on his usual diatribe against the press and called them “fake news.”

While Mr. Trump spoke against the media, immigration and open borders, the dinner that he skipped turned out to be a platform that endorsed all that. “No one wanted to do this, so, of course, it lands in the hands of an immigrant,” Mr, Minhaj, whose family hails from Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, said. Now working on the Daily Show Comedy Central, Mr. Minhaj will have his own show on Netflix soon. On a more serious note, the 31-year-old said: "Only in America can a first-generation Indian-American Muslim kid get on this stage and make fun of the President. It's a sign to the rest of the world, it's this amazing tradition, that even the president is not beyond the reach of the First Amendment.”

Mr. Minhaj’s humour hit the Trump administration and the media in almost equal measure. “A lot of people don’t trust you right now, and can you blame them?” he asked the journalists. “Remember Election Night? That was your Steve Harvey-Miss Universe moment. The look on your faces at 11 p.m. on Election Night, it was like walking into a Panera Bread and finding out your sixth-grade teacher has a part-time job there.”

Taking a swipe at CNN for overusing the ‘breaking news’ tag, he said: “Everything isn’t breaking news. You can’t go to Defcon One just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturizer … Every time I watch CNN, it feels like you’re assigning me homework. Is Trump a Russian spy? I don’t know, you tell me … I’m watching the news. It feels like I’m watching CNN watch the news. Just take an hour, figure out what you want to say, then go on the air.”

The comedian said journalists ought to be more careful “in the age of Trump.” “Because you are how the president gets his news … You can’t make any mistakes, because when one of you messes up, he blames your entire group. And now you know what it feels like to be a minority.”

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, journalists who broke the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, also spoke at the correspondents’ dinner. “Like politicians and presidents, sometimes, perhaps too frequently, we make mistakes and go too far. When that happens, we should own up to it. But the effort..is largely made in good faith. Mr. President, the media is not fake news,” Mr. Woodward said.