Wednesday, the White House Correspondents Association announced that Michelle Wolf will be hosting the association's yearly dinner on Saturday, April 28. Wolf, a Late Night with Seth Meyers alum, has been on a steep rise these past four years. She leapt from Late Night to The Daily Show, briefly dwelling in a self-created digital series called Now Hiring with Michelle Wolf in between. She ended 2017 with an HBO special titled Nice Lady, and entered 2018 with a bang: In early February, Netflix announced that Wolf would helm her own weekly talk show to premiere later this year. It's no longer acceptable to refer to her as "up-and-coming"; Michelle Wolf has up-and-come. Her former boss Seth Meyers dubbed it "The Year of the Wolf" on Twitter.
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Wolf follows in the footsteps of fellow Daily Show alums Hasan Minhaj, who hosted last year, and Larry Wilmore, who hosted in 2016. (Cecily Strong hosted the year before, and Joel McHale the year before her.) Though she claims she's not an overtly political comedian — her new show, the press release explained, would only talk about politics "if it's funny" — Wolf's comedy style is undeniably topical. At HBO's Night of Too Many Stars, Wolf performed a good five minutes on the trans bathroom ban. ("Stop using 'We're protecting women' as your excuse for getting stuff done. It's bullshit and it's insulting," she told the crowd.)
What Wolf perhaps means when she says she's not "political," is that her humor vies away from the typically dry topical humor. Wolf is zany. She's not afraid of a poop joke or making a fart noise onstage. One of her favorite jokes she told on Late Night involved a fake product called a "tampoon" — a cross between a lampoon and a tampon.
"It's that time of the month — for adventure!" is the product's tagline. (See the full bit, below.)
Wolf's comedy is more indulgent than most political humor. Wolf giggles while she performs; more importantly, she has fun. She loves doing stand up!
"When I get to do stand-up at night, it’s, like, the thing I get to do for me," she told The Village Voice last year. "It’s my thoughts, my jokes. It’s the most fun I have."
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Wolf has seen the other side of the moon, too. After college, she worked at Bear Stearns, an erstwhile global investment bank that was subsumed by J.P. Morgan in 2008 after the financial crisis. Wolf eventually made the leap from the finance life to the comedy life in 2014, when she was among the first writers hired for Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Wolf is also — this is a thing I care about; welcome to my world! — an avid runner and has said that if she weren't a comedian, she'd be an exercise physiologist. She always wears cool shoes and she documents her running life on Instagram. Just this weekend, she ran 25 miles to help pace a friend of hers running 100k! Her Instagram presence reads more like a blogger than a stand up comic. That's what makes her different: She's earnest, enthusiastic, and a little bit bawdy.
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