The 69th Annual Writers Guild Awards, held Sunday night, was a celebration of writing in all forms and formats, but the festivities quickly turned political, with hosts Lewis Black (on the East Coast) and Patton Oswalt (on the West Coast) kicking off the night’s anti-Trump theme. During Black’s opening monologue, he marveled at current events, which he called living in “fictional times.” After watching the president’s press conference, he said, his brain froze, wondering how to make any of it funny. “What the hell is fiction anymore, when our reality comes off as fiction?” he asked. “We are living at the intersection of satire and reality. If you were to take the reality we’re living in and make it into a movie, you’d say, ‘Great movie!’”
Even with all the talent in the room at the New York ceremony — which included Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, The Wire creator David Simon, filmmaker John Waters, and The Americans showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields — Black surmised that “none of us” could have created the “menagerie of characters” that comprise Trump’s stranger-than-fiction inner circle. He ran through the list, insulting and dismissing a few in rapid succession. Kellyanne Conway? “She’s not the person you hire when you need to explain what a crazy man meant,” Black said. “She’s the person you need to get when you want to get rid of your daughter’s cheerleading rival.” Ben Carson? “The first time I heard him speak, I thought, ‘Wow! I could have been a brain surgeon.” Rick Perry? “Says he wants to get rid of the Department of Energy, but can’t remember its name. Then he leaves the race, he does Dancing With the Stars, Trump sees him on the show and says, ‘Wow! He’s got a lot of energy! Let’s put him in charge of that department!’” Steve Bannon? “You know why he scares me? Because he looks how I feel when I have a hangover,” Black said. As for Trump himself, it’s an insult to babies to call him a baby (or make memes representing him as a baby), “because babies have more control over their colon than he has over his mouth.”
With all of these characters, “that’s a hell of a movie,” Black said. But we’re not even close to seeing the full picture yet. What we’ve glimpsed so far “is only the trailer.”
