The White House correspondents’ dinner will not feature a comedian for the first time in decades

Reporting from WASHINGTON —  Say goodbye to the jokes that have flowed from the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner for decades: The White House Correspondents’ Assn. announced Monday that biographer Ron Chernow will be the featured speaker at the annual black-tie event in the spring.

Having a serious speaker -- Chernow is an esteemed historian who has chronicled the lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Ulysses S. Grant, among others -- is a big break from the tradition of having a stand-up comedian entertain the ballroom of journalists, members of Congress and administration types.

“I’m delighted that Ron will share his lively, deeply researched perspectives on American politics and history at the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” WHCA President Olivier Knox, who is the chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, said in a news release. “As we celebrate the importance of a free and independent news media to the health of the republic, I look forward to hearing Ron place this unusual moment in the context of American history.”

The programming switcheroo followed the controversy over last year’s comedian, Michelle Wolf, who landed polarizing punchlines about White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who attended the dinner and sat at the head table in the stead of her boss. “She burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye,” Wolf said of President Trump’s spokeswoman, whom she also likened to an “Uncle Tom, but for white women who disappoint other white women.”

“The so-called comedian really ‘bombed,’” tweeted Trump, who had skipped the dinner for the second time in his presidency.

Following the announcement Monday, Wolf tweeted that the correspondents’ association “are cowards. The media is complicit. And I couldn’t be prouder.”

Chernow’s material is likely to be far less edgy than Wolf’s. “The White House Correspondents’ Assn. has asked me to make the case for the 1st Amendment and I am happy to oblige,” Chernow said in the association’s news release. “Freedom of the press is always a timely subject and this seems like the perfect moment to go back to basics.”

But he promised to make his performance at the event, which will take place April 27, at least a little entertaining. “While I have never been mistaken for a stand-up comedian, I promise that my history lesson won’t be dry,” he said.

Since the early 1980s, the dinner has featured a stand-up act by a celebrity comic who makes jokes targeting both the president and the media. The president gets his turn at the mic to deliver a jokey stand-up act of his own. But that setup has become fraught in recent years due to Trump’s boycott, which leaves half the jokes landing on a target who isn’t there to give as good as he gets.

The dinner itself, too, has come under scrutiny for its transformation into a celebrity-laden spectacle in which sources and the journalists who cover them appear to cozy up for a formal-dress schmooze. And in the Trump years, it has lost some of its luster because the president and Hollywood types have stayed away.

But will a dinner with fewer laughs -- and a bigger focus on the 1st Amendment and the association’s scholarships that the dinner funds -- be any fun? “Frankly, people don’t want to put on a tux and come out on a Saturday night to get lectured to,” Frank Sesno, a former CNN correspondent who now heads George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, said before the first dinner under the Trump administration.

But this year’s decision might have come down to the bottom line: After the 2018 dinner, several news organizations that are members of the WHCA threatened to pull financial support unless the board eliminated the comedic performance.