EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Tom Cotton's advice to Sen. John Kennedy before his Gridiron speech proved prophetic
Sen. Cotton warned Sen. Kennedy that attendees at the Gridiron Dinner don't find some jokes funny. That proved all too true.
Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) is always ready with a quick soundbite, but the 2019 Gridiron Dinner was a different animal for even the talkative Louisianan.
So, he reached out to Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) for advice, as Kennedy recounts in his new book, How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will.
In a section obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, Kennedy details reaching out to Cotton — a former Gridiron speaker in his own right — to ask for help.
“In the lead-up to the event, I called Senator Tom Cotton, who had done the Gridiron Dinner before,” Kennedy chronicles in his book. “I asked him how he’d come up with his jokes. He told me that many senators who weren’t naturally funny (most of them) hired a comedy writer to assist.”
So, Kennedy “had one of my staff members check around and learned that the going rate to hire a joke writer in Washington was around ten thousand dollars,” he wrote. But, in a move unsurprising to anyone who has seen Kennedy on television, he instead said “screw that. I decided to write my own jokes, and I asked my staff for their contributions as well. I finally came up with what I thought was a pretty good speech. Just before the day of the dinner, Cotton warned me that although the media crowd at the dinner would definitely laugh at the jokes I’d written about my fellow Republicans, they were much less likely to laugh at the jokes about Democrats or the media.”
Unsurprisingly, Cotton was right. Kennedy jokes about Alabama, Tom Brady, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) scored big laughs.
Kennedy’s anti-Alabama screed was driven by Alabama consistently beating Louisiana State University in football. So Kennedy lashed out at the southern state. “Do you know why Alabama raised the drinking age to thirty- two? They wanted to keep alcohol out of the high schools.”
His joke about Cruz also caught Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the crosshairs, and it came after Brady’s second Super Bowl win over the Rams.
“Was that a great game or what?” Kennedy asked of the 13-3 affair. “If I wanted to watch guys failing to score for three hours, I would have taken Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders to a singles bar.”
While the Gridiron audience was quick to laugh about Republicans — and Sanders — Kennedy observed that there were some cows too sacred to slaughter, namely journalists and the Democrats they cover for.
At one point, Kennedy directly addressed the journalists in the high-priced room. “‘We’ve learned so much together these past two years. You’ve learned the meaning of ‘ whangdoodle’ — a term I sometimes use — ‘I’ve learned what you mean when you call me clickbait, and we have both learned that a modest new tax on politicians in blackface would raise billions.’”
“Hardly anyone laughed” at Kennedy’s joke about journalists and Virginia’s blackface-clad governor, Democrat Ralph Northam.
While many in attendance were willing to greet Kennedy’s comedy with silence, one “twentysomething young man” gave the senator a piece of his mind.
The man in question said that Kennedy’s “speech, while funny, was ‘slightly misogynistic’ in places.”
“I asked the kid’s name, and he took off like a hound for the tree line,” Kennedy noted.
“I’ve always assumed he later went on to a high-level job in the Biden-Harris administration,” he added.