Jim Gaffigan Tapped As the Master of Ceremonies For This Year’s Al Smith Dinner
AP Photo/Riccardo De Luca
This year’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a key event held annually but a tradition during every presidential election cycle, will be hosted once again by comedian Jim Gaffigan.
Gaffigan, who previously MCed the Al Smith dinner in 2018, announced on his Instagram account on Friday that he’d return for this year’s event. Also invited, per tradition, are the 2024 presidential candidates, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Gaffigan joked: “I’m so honored to be MCing this year’s Al Smith Memorial Dinner on October 17th. Too bad I don’t recognize those two names in the middle of the invitation. Anyone ever heard of them?”
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The Al Smith dinner generally features light-hearted addresses by a variety of political figures, often giving political opponents the chance to take a break from the everyday vitriol to jovially roast each other. (Sometimes not so jovially.)
The previous presidential race happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, so then-President Trump and then-candidate Joe Biden addressed the gathering virtually. (That was also the year that apparently broke the notoriously clean comedian, who lambasted Trump in a series of social media posts, calling him — in one tweet — “a traitor and a con man” and “a liar and a criminal.”)
