‘House of Cards’ Skit Kicks Off White House Correspondents’ Dinner

The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner took place yesterday, and among the usual gentle ribbing and insider humor that punctuates the ceremony (unless Stephen Colbert is involved), a skit featuring Kevin Spacey combined Netflix’s successful House of Cards series with real-life Washington politics.

The skit, which has been posted online in its entirety by C-SPAN, has Spacey creating the seating chart for the dinner, for which he must call in favors and enlist help from his underlings. In addition to being quite funny, the skit is a testament to House of Cards‘ place in American pop culture. When it first came out, critics wondered whether it had the appeal to get discussed around the water cooler. By reaching the White House, it’s gone a lot farther than that.

Beyond the House of Cards skit, the dinner also featured a few other clever segments, all of which can be found on YouTube. Conan O’Brien’s address

received mixed reviews, but his apt comparison of Harry Reid and the husband from American Gothic was spot on.

As in previous years, the President displayed an appropriately self-deprecating attitude, delivering a funny speech that included plenty of jokes at his own expense. He too appeared in a sketch, where he pretended to be Daniel Day-Lewis method acting as him in a biopic titled Obama. Steven Spielberg and Tracy Morgan make guest appearances, the latter as Joe Biden.

Given that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner’s most famous moment received much of its attention on YouTube, it’s only fitting that the event would ‘give back’, so to speak. Celebrating one of the best web releases in recent memory certainly does the trick.