In 2018, stand-up star and former Daily Show correspondent Michelle Wolf set the American news media ablaze with her burn of then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Now that nobody is allowed to roast the powerful anymore at the Whcd, Wolf wants all the smoke.

When Wolf hosted the annual meeting of America’s most important political leaders and the journalists who are supposed to hold them accountable during Donald Trump’s first term as president, she unloaded a series of scathing smackdowns on the entirety of Washington, D.C. and its most influential citizens. But somehow, out of all the brutal roasts Wolf delivered to the frowning faces of the political elite, one of Wolf’s most mild burns of the night became the only line from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to elicit multiple weeks of round-the-clock commentary in all the major news outlets...