During his Fox News Radio show on Monday, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade made a case that comedian Michelle Wolf’s monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — in particular, her jokes about Sarah Sanders — were inappropriate, because her targets aren’t sufficiently powerful.

Kilmeade, who was in attendance on Saturday, claimed, “very few, I can tell you, were laughing at Michelle Wolf. Cringing, more likely. Because — because there was a victim. With comedy, the victim should be powerful people. They shouldn’t be Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.”

Here’s the audio, via Media Matters:

Kilmeade’s argument would make sense if Sanders and Conway weren’t public figures, or were being forced to serve as two of the most recognizable faces in the Trump White House against their will. But that is not the case.

On Fox & Friends, hosts expressed similar objections to Wolf’s monologue. Kilmeade made a case that the solution is not to stop booking comedians at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner altogether, but to book ones that will do a better job going after both sides.


“A lot of people says, ‘well, it’s time to cut the comedian’ — I don’t think it’s time to cut the comedian,” Kilmeade said. “I would think that Jay Leno would be the guy. You come in there, you use the issues and you have fun, and you mock both sides.”

In particular, Fox & Friends hosts objected Wolf’s joke about how Sanders “burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye.” Even though Wolf’s joke was about Sanders honesty and not her makeup skills, host Ainsley Earhardt said Sanders was “sitting five feet from this comedian, and this comedian is making fun of her appearance.”