My wife and I attended the Annual Dinner of the White House Correspondent’s Association last night, held at the Washington HIlton Hotel, aka the “Hinckley Hilton” where President Reagan was shot. I saw a lot people pointing to the actual sight of the attempted assassination, but no reenactments taking place.

The association has been hosting these events — part roast, part comic revue — for decades but it’s been in recent years that the media organizations that bought the tables started bringing Hollywood stars in to add celebrity wattage to the luster of DC’s deepest dweebs. I mean, I like Sam Donaldson and Joe Klein as much as the next guy, but they can’t hold a candle to Padma Lakshmi or Kal Penn, two of the attendees I saw adding an international flavor to the festivities.

In an attempt at bipartisanship, the meal consisted of salmon AND beef, nestled against each other in a way that would nauseate your average vegetarian. So it was with the evening’s entertainment: once the thousands attending the black-tie do were settled in the cacophonous ballroom beneath the hotel, they proceeded to ignore association president Ann Compton as she gamely tried to announce the recipients of the college scholarship awards they dole out each year. Despite her attempts to shame the crowd into honoring the students, the assembled wonks and demi-stars paid her no mind, intent as they were on mingling and schmoozing with each other. (“If a bomb were to go off here now,” I asked a woman from the Obama campaign who I happened to be seated next to, “would the world be a better place?”)

Then the president took the podium and the entertainment began. Bush is famously inept at prepared remarks, though my wife met him before the show and swore he was much more of a relaxed joker in private. Maybe he’s just glad to be getting out of there. I sensed some relief among those in attendance at the prospect of seeing him no more. Though his jokes were equal parts game and lame, there was a great sigh when he said, “I’m going to leave you now…” Yes! His last gag, in which he led the US Marine Band, waving a baton like Mickey Mouse commanding the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, after declaring, “I always wanted to do this!”

Later that evening, Washington correspondent Carl Cannon, son of Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, called the moment “classic Bush.”

“He is the frat-boy-in-chief,” he told me, “but a lot of people would like to do that.” Cannon and his father coauthored a book comparing Bush to Reagan (not altogether favorably) and he’s had opportunities to defend him before. “Anything he does is by definition presidential. That doesn’t necessarily mean dignified.”

I’m all for being undignified (you should have seen the shirt I wanted to wear with my tux, the David Lee Roth number my wife vetoed) and I don’t mind Bush pretending to lead a military band. It’s him pretending to lead the military I have problems with.

The closer was late night comedian Craig Ferguson — “another case of an immigrant taking a job Americans don’t want,” as the Scotsman (and newly minted American citizen) put it. It’s a thankless task: after Stephen Colbert excoriated the media in attendance at the 2006 dinner, the association ran for cover by hiring Rich Little to do the honors last year. Little, who I literally watched when I was a kid, is best known for doing impressions of people who are no longer alive.

Ferguson, who is both an author and a recovering alcoholic, has famously broken the fourth wall of late night TV comedy a few times, as when he talked candidly about the hypocrisy of celebrity bashing last year. For this event, though, he generally hewed to a sort of safe middle-ground, making fun of his native peat (“Al Qaeda tried to bring a religious war to Scotland. You’re a thousand years too late!”) and such safe targets as the New York Times, which was too cheap, I mean principled, to buy a table at last night’s event. His only real shot at the press there came when he said, “It’s your job to watch the government and make sure they don’t exceed their power — well done on that, by the way.”