Carr Lampoons Himself at FCBA Dinner With Demonstrators Outside
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr cracked self-deprecating jokes about his relationship with President Donald Trump, the uproar over his conflict with Jimmy Kimmel, and his colleagues on the commission during his first address as chairman at the annual FCBA dinner Wednesday night. Directly across Massachusetts Avenue from the event at Washington’s Marriott Marquis hotel, Free Press, Public Knowledge and Tech Freedom projected criticisms of the Carr administration onto the front of the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church.
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Opening for the 1,300 attendees by pretending to read a letter from predecessor Jessica Rosenworcel advising him to keep a low profile in his first year, Carr played clips from Jimmy Kimmel Live!, South Park and Saturday Night Live lampooning him. “I got Democrats to praise Ted Cruz,” Carr said, referencing the Texas senator's condemnation of Carr pressuring networks to preempt Kimmel’s show. He also said Sinclair and Nexstar would preempt the broadcast of the FCC’s upcoming Senate oversight hearing as a “business decision.”
In addition, Carr used the U.S. Mint’s announcement that it would no longer produce pennies to make a copper retirement pun and said it was “hard to be an adult child of divorce” in a joke about Trump’s online conflict with Elon Musk. He played an AI-created video of the FCC commissioners as infants running an open meeting and showed a graphic of what he would look like with Trump’s hairdo. Carr also delivered jokes about Dish Network's spectrum, Communications Daily's subscription price, and Commissioner Nathan Simington's sudden exit from the FCC. Carr said before Thursday's dinner Simington "assured me that he was going to stay through the entire meal, but just as the appetizers finally started coming out, he got up and left."
Carr closed by reading a series of posts on X about himself, in the vein of Kimmel's "Mean Tweets" segments. One post, purporting to be from former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, read, "Even I think you should tone it down."
"Listen, folks, I know you wanted a professional comedian here tonight," Carr said. "So did I, but unfortunately, Jimmy Kimmel got his job back."
The protesting groups said the FCBA's annual dinner, which raises money for college scholarships, is a good cause, and they weren’t objecting to that. But Carr’s actions “are not just,” Free Press Vice President of Policy Matt Wood told us across the street while a projector showed such slogans as “Resist Censorship,” “Federal Censorship Commission” and “Defend the 1st Amendment” cycled over and over on the church’s facade. Carr’s threats of regulatory action against media companies due to their content go well beyond just using the chairmanship as a bully pulpit, Wood said. While Carr has said he’s not doing anything different from what other agency chairs have done in the recent past, his talk of applying the public interest standard to media companies marks a 180-degree turn from his previous position on that standard, Wood added.
Despite the demonstration, Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld complimented Carr's jokes in a post on X Thursday. "I give [Carr] a good review for last night's FCBA Chairman's Dinner performance. I will caveat this by noting we do not select FCC Chairs for their stand up chops. But that said, I thought it was largely funny in an insider way."