David Letterman is praising Michelle Wolf’s “guts” at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, saying she was able to “decimate the place” with her controversial remarks.
“So I saw the complete script of what she had done,” Letterman told Jerry Seinfeld of Wolf’s performance, as part of a Monday night conversation hosted by Netflix at the FYSee space in Los Angeles.
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“The more I got to thinking about it, I thought ‘Wow, that was great,’ ” Letterman continued. “Because, just, whatever the reaction — there’s no damage. And she had the guts to stand up there and didn’t apologize, where you know everybody is now apologizing for everything.”
“So whether you liked it or not, I really had great admiration for the fact that she was able to just walk into that room and decimate the place,” Letterman, 71, added.
The former face of CBS’s “Late Show,” who now hosts Netflix’s “My Next Guest Needs no Introduction,” has been a vocal critic of President Trump.
Wolf stirred up controversy at last month’s annual correspondents’ dinner when she took aim at White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other Trump administration officials as part of an explicit set.
Many prominent journalists panned the performance, and Trump called the “Daily Show” alumna a “filthy comedian” who “totally bombed.” But many comics — including Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers, among others — defended Wolf’s comments. Starting at the end of May, she will be on Netflix as host of “The Break with Michelle Wolf.”
When Letterman inquired Monday if he knows Wolf, Seinfeld responded that he’s just watched her on TV.
“But everybody talks about how dedicated — that she’s out every night working on her stuff. And those are the kind of people I really like,” Seinfeld, 64, said.
Asked if he makes cracks about Trump as part of his stand-up routine, Seinfeld quipped, “No, it doesn’t interest me. I do a lot of raisin stuff.”
“I have a lot of raisin material,” the “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” star said. “Because you know, you have the Sun-Maid company … and then you have the Raisinet people.”
“I just think it’s interesting that after 80 years, Sun-Maid finally went, ‘Hey, why don’t we put some chocolate on it?’ Like imagine not thinking of that for 80 years,” said Seinfeld. “So that really gets me excited that people pay me to talk about those kinds of things.”