BBC has hired top party guru Philip Dufour to capture the media stars, their guests, and the accolades for 2010.

Dufour also worked on MSNBC’s 2009 after party. The event, held at the Washington Historical Society, was unforgettable. The evening included a Starbucks “Morning Joe” coffee bar and a celeb mixologist, Rachel Maddow.

Check out WHCInsider’s coverage of the 2009 party.

RTCA from whcinsider on Vimeo.

John Hodgman

Netizens are viewing John Hodgman’s RTCA dinner routine in greater numbers than Wanda Sykes’ WHCD routine — that’s not a surprise. But Mediabistro points out Hodgman’s numbers top President Obama’s RTCA remarks, proving “don’t understimate a nerd.”

Read the rest of the post here.

And check out Hodgman’s comments here.

MSNBC threw a memorable Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner after-party that stood apart from parties past.  Held directly across the street from the main event at the Washington Convention Center, MSNBC turned the traditionally staid Historical Society of Washington, D.C. into a brightly-lit fete of themed cocktails, glowing neon necklaces and comfort food.

As guests walked down the blue carpet entrance, we asked them the question of the night: are you a nerd or a jock? Politico’s Mike Allen said he was “all of the above!” and Patrick Gavin thought he was a hybrid of the two.  NBC’s Andrea Mitchell exclaimed she was a “total jock.” John “I’m a PC” Hodgman discussed the modern cultural divide at length during the dinner.

Inside the party, the scene downstairs included a Starbucks-sponsored coffee bar where guests ate ice cream sundaes and desserts.  From the main bar, guests walked outside to a large outdoor patio, where dance music had the party-goers on their feet for “Don’t Stop Believing.”  Faces and heads glowed in the light of neon necklaces and headbands.

Upstairs, special guest bartender Rachel Maddow was mixing up cocktails at her heavily-branded “Rachel Maddow’s Bar”– complete with MSNBC napkins and “Rachel’s Bar” menus.  Maddow’s signature cocktail was listed as a Hearst: a mix of gin, sweet vermouth and bitters (though she told us she actually served more of her cava drink, “Airmail” which mixed rum, fresh lime juice, honey and the bubbly cava on top).  Afterwards, Maddow relinquished her bar duties to catch up with Ana Marie Cox and John Hodgman.

Later in the night passed treats included mini-pancakes and mini-ham, bacon and cheese croissants.  As the bars began to close, guests went out back. Among the last to leave at 3:00 a.m. were MSNBC Morning Joe’s Willie Geist, Luke Russert and many of the cable network’s junior staffers.

Media heavy-hitters spotted at the party: Steve Capus, Tamron Hall, Norah O’Donnell, Contessa Brewer with Matt Ackland, Joe Scarborough with Mika Brzezinski, David Shuster, Carlos Watson, Chris Matthews, Lynn Sweet, Margaret Carlson, and Eugene Robinson.

Politicos rounded out the guest list, including Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Obama economic adviser Larry Summers, as well as Hilary Rosen, Alex Castellanos, Brad Dayspring, and Kevin Madden.

The MSNBC-thrown after-party, attended by Obama advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, among others, had a different vibe than Fox’s fondly remembered 2004 disco affair: more cocktails and comfort-food. Contessa Brewer’s black dress, with its open back, was one of the more daring of the evening and drew admirers; her lengthy conversation with NBC News president Steve Capus had some guessing. The special drinks that Rachel Maddow was mixing up behind the bar — including her “signature cocktail” the Hearst (gin, sweet vermouth and bitters) — must have been potent: The last of the NBC junior staffers trickled out after 3 a.m.

Obama as Comedian-in-Chief

As for the dinner itself, the reviews are in: President Obama was pretty funny. Then again, it’s hard to know — it could be just another manifestation of that whole being-in-bed-with-the-press phenomenon that he poked fun at in his remarks last night. “Why bother hanging out with celebrities when I can spend time with people who make me one?” Obama said, comparing the RTCA event to the Hollywood celeb-studded White House Correspondents Association dinner in May.

Unlike the WHCD, there was no one line that everyone grabbed on to, but the papers, Twitterers and bloggers found plenty to like, although they appear to be tiring of his frequent jokes about chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s colorful vocabulary. (Last night’s: “In Egypt, we had the opportunity to tour the pyramids. And by now, I’m sure you’ve all seen the pictures of Rahm on that camel. I admit, I was a little nervous about the whole situation. I said at the time, ‘This is a wild animal known to bite, kick and spit. And who knows what the camel could do.’ “)

He got pick up for his one about health-care reform, in which he noted that he had gained the American Medical Association’s support and then added: “It proves true the old expression that it’s easier to catch flies with honey. And if honey doesn’t work, feel free to use an open palm and a swift, downward wrist motion,” a reference to his fly-killing skills exhibited in a recent CNBC interview.

And they even repeated his joke at their expense:  ”But you probably wouldn’t understand the concept of troubled industries, working as you do in radio and television,” with the audience groans inspiring him to add: “What, I can’t joke about that?”

Ousted Miss California Carrie Prejean, a guest of Fox News, appeared to be the biggest celebrity in the Hollywood mold, along with Tate Donovan (“Damages,” “The O.C.”) But with no red carpet, it was hard for some to tell as they scanned the crowd.  Many attendees had a jury’s-still-out reaction to the move to the Convention Center, although the extra bathrooms and better Internet access, compared to the Hilton, were plusses for some.

Obama addresses RTCA dinner

The paucity of non-D.C. boldface names and the dinner’s first appearance on a Friday night made for less frenzy and a more laid-back clubby affair. “PC” guy John Hodgman from the Mac ads got mostly raves from the Twitterati (with a few dissenters) for getting Obama to flash the “live long and prosper” Vulcan salute, in his why-Obama-is-the-”first nerd President of the modern era” speech that marked a decided detour from traditional comedian topical humor fare.

John Hodgman quizzed Obama on nerd factor at RTCA dinner

Author, actor and occasional “Daily Show” contributor John Hodgman’s “nerd v. jock” speech following the president got raves from some, seemed to go over the heads of others, and appeared to have found its most-important mark: President Obama laughed with seemingly real appreciation, as he was quizzed about his apparent love of comic book characters and sci-fi, and egged into giving the Vulcan salute.

Before the speeches, an Onion News Network “special report” poking mild fun at TV anchors who talked too much fell flat on TV, but got laughs in the room, according to some. President Obama watched attentively as Sweet Honey in the Rock performed.

A short video paid tribute to three journalists who passed away in the last year: CNN’s Bill Headline, NBC’s Tim Russert and Tony Snow, the Fox News anchor-turned-White House spokesman.

The Joan Barone Award went to Mike Viqueira, NBC News’ Capitol Hill producer, while the three daughters of David J. Bloom caused some to tear up as they presented the award named in memory of their father to Orla Guerin, the Africa correspondent for the BBC. It was accepted in her name by BBC America’s Rome Hartman.

President Obama at 2009 RTCA Dinner

President Obama in his speech to the RTCA got right to the heart of Washington’s journalist dinner rivalry, saying he was on hand to “Tell jokes that weren’t funny enough for me to use when we did this five weeks ago,” at the White House Correspondents’ dinner (known as the Senior Prom to the RTCA’s Junior Prom.) Then again, he said, twisting the knife deeper: “The jokes may not be as good but neither is the guest list.”

And later: “I think your programming is more relevant than ever before — at least that’s the impression that I get when I read the blogs.”

In his appearance before the Radio and TV correspondents at the Washington D.C. Convention Center, the President was unaccompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama on the orange and yellow rose-rimmed dais and he left at 9:20, before dinner was served. His short stay prompted some last-minute frantic juggling of the entertainment lineup, according to insiders. VP Biden wasn’t there, either, despite apparently erroneous earlier reports that he would attend. A spokeswoman said that he had a scheduling conflict.

Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, right after the speech, noted the President’s “sharp elbowed humor;” a few tweets from the dinner suggested that his humor was “underappreciated” by the audience. He cracked himself up several times, however.

The biggest laughs of the night came when he joked about embattled California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger competing on “I’m a Celebrity….Get Me Out of Here,” then added: “That’s how I feel about tonight.” The dinner, he said, was causing him to miss “date night” with Michelle, and his plans to go for Thai food-pause-”in Bangkok.”

A joke about being in bed with NBC’s Brian Williams, whom he called a terrible house guest, was followed by a list of new TV programs that the success of “Inside the White House” had inspired, the funniest of which was TLC’s “Jon & Kate plus Peter Orszag.”

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski

There was also a mild jab at NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd for having the style of a TV correspondent and “the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” To MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, he said: “We both have partners named Joe who used to be in Congress and don’t know when to stop talking.” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, he noted, was “the only other man in America with his own situation room,” and it was cooler than the President’s, which he said, was unable “to generate the bandwidth to turn Larry Summers into a hologram.”

Random jokes poked fun at his own Administration, including Richard Holbrooke, whom he alleged sprayed WD-40 that caused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s elbow-breaking fall. He announced a “new” plan to rescue the auto business, telling dinner guests to look under their seat, a la Oprah, because everyone was getting a car company. Fox, he said, would get AIG.

Looking relieved that his speech was over, the President ended his remarks with a serious tribute to the work of the press, noting “I am here tonight because I appreciate the role you do.” He got the traditional standing ovation at the beginning and end.

CNN Anchor Wolf Blitzer will attend the RTCA dinner

CBS, which is hosting a pre-party at the Convention Center, will have, among others, RNC Chairman Michael Steele; National Security Council member Samantha Powers; Dag Vega, the White House’s director of broadcast media and Lebanese Ambassador Antoine Chedid.

CNN, which took a full 15 tables, is hosting CIA Director Leon Panetta, U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan; White House Communications Director Anita Dunn and, as it usually does, a number of military folks, including Army Lt. General Francis Kearney.

There will be a full roster of CNN talent there, too, including Wolf Blitzer, Ed Henry, Suzanne Malveaux, Dan Lothian, Joe Johns, Heidi Collins, Brianna Keilar, Gloria Borger, Bill Schneider, Kate Bolduan, Barbara Starr, Chris Lawrence, Lisa Sylvester, Tom Foreman, Jim Acosta, Howard Kurtz and Jeffrey Toobin.

Sweet Honey in the Rock to perform at RTCA dinner

Instead of a comedian or impressionist, guests at the Convention Center on Friday night will hear music from Sweet Honey in the Rock, the all-female African-American a cappella group that the RTCA dinner organizers tout as “a favorite of the First Lady.” Humor will come from JibJab.com, which says on its blog that it is “beyond thrilled” that its first satire of the Obama administration will premiere in front of the man himself. (The satirists entertained President George W. Bush with “What We Call the News” at the 2007 dinner, as well.) Onion News Network will have a “special report.”

“For our dinner, entertainment is a plural term, not a singular term,” says Heather Dahl, a producer at Feature Story News and the dinner’s chair.

Despite the smaller table buys from some news organizations in this money-crunched year, what will stay the same, she says, is the attendance: Her preliminary estimates are that the crowd will number in the ballpark of recent dinners, around 2,000 attendees.

International news organizations took more tables, Dahl says, and some journalists whose employers refused to pony up for full tables have paid their own way. “I believe this shows that people really want to go out and have a nice evening, so that’s what we’re going to deliver,” she says.

President George Bush at 2008 RTCA Dinner

In 2008, even its entertainer/host Mo Rocca dissed the RTCA dinner, calling it the Nicky (Hilton) to the White House Correspondent Dinner’s Paris. And indeed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (aka “Senior Prom”) in recent years has bigger celebrities (the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Pamela Anderson, Ben Affleck and Mariska Hargitay), more of them and more-buzzed about pre- and post-parties.  Check out some of the pics from last year here.

The RTCA dinner is now in its 65th year. It’s Hollywood quotient in the last decade was mostly limited to activist actors Ron Silver and Al Franken and hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, although Jon Voight and Fran Drescher also put in appearances. But it has a recent history of making headlines from the stage; highlights (lowlights?) include entertainer Don Imus’ raunchy jokes about President Bill Clinton’s personal life in 1996, a major PR gaffe by President George W. Bush in 2004, and, in 2007, a bizarre rappin’ “MC [Karl] Rove.” And unlike the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner, the RTCA’s, which in recent years has been held at the Washington Hilton, is open to TV cameras.

Once upon a time, the tables were switched: Radio and television correspondents worked for richer news organizations and were better paid than their print colleagues and many were glamorous stars in their own right, giving their dinner the higher profile of the two. In 1987, however, the Baltimore Sun’s Michael Kelly started inviting the likes of Fawn Hall and Donna Rice to the White House Correspondents’ dinner and the competition was on.

The Washington Post’s Kim Masters called Mr. Imus’ appearance in 1996 “a roast that turned into an inferno.” The radio shock jock, as President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton sat just feet away, joked that: “When Cal Ripkin broke Lou Gherig’s consecutive game record, the president was at Camden Yards doin’ play by play in the radio with John Miller. Bobby Bonilla hit a double, we all heard the President in his obvious excitement holler ‘Go Baby!’ I remember commenting at the time, I bet that’s not the first time he’s said that. Remember the Astroturf in the pickup?”

He also poked fun at ABC News’ Peter Jennings (who wasn’t there) and CBS News’ Dan Rather (who was.)

Don Imus

Mr. Imus was unrepentant (the New York Times reported that on his radio show the next Monday he said that he had “wimped out”) but the dinner committee issued a formal apology to the President, whose spokesman, Mike McCurry, called the routine  “pretty bad.” C-Span denied an administration request to pull a rebroadcast of the night’s events, but Imus’s comments live on in cyberspace.

Subsequent hosts–among them Lewis Black, Ben Stein, Darrell Hammond, Mo Rocca and Steve Bridges–trod more middle ground. TBS’ impressionist Frank Caliendo, at the time just making a name for himself, brought the house down in 2006, sending Vice President Cheney into fits of laughter.

Mr. Clinton knew how to give it back. The 2000 dinner had a much-sought-after souvenir: Red and green “Free Leo” buttons and stickers being handed out by White House staffers in a reference to the news-versus-entertainment brouhaha involving ABC News sending a then-25-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, star of “Titanic,” to interview President Clinton for an Earth Day special.

The President, who was introduced that night not with the traditional “Hail to the Chief,” but with “Titanic” theme song “My Heart Will Go On,” quipped in his remarks that “ABC doesn’t know whether Leo and I had an interview, a walk-through or a drive-by.” As a stony-faced ABC News President David Westin looked on, he added that, “I’m not sure whether all this damage control is worth the effort: It’s a little bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the set of ‘This Week With Sam and Cokie,’ ” the network’s struggling Sunday morning show, and then continued: “Don’t you news people ever learn? It isn’t the mistake that kills you, it’s the cover-up.”

In 2003, the dinner was postponed from its March 20 date to June, due to uncertainty over the starting date for the Iraq War (a good call given that the invasion indeed began on the dinner’s original date.) The following year, President Bush came in for harsh criticism when his stand-up routine at the dinner include a slide show in which he joked about the search for weapons of mass destruction (one of the justifications for going into Iraq), showing him looking under the Oval Office furniture. Not everyone in the audience was laughing.

The following year, in 2005, the President and many other invited guests were unexpectedly off in Rome for Pope John Paul II’s funeral, so VP Dick Cheney filled in, and it was a sober event. CNN’s celebrity guests were a group of U.S. soldiers, wounded in Iraq, who were being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center

But Mr. Cheney was funnier in 2008, garbed in his supposed post-White House vacation clothes of fedora and sunglasses.

Still it was hard for him to White House adviser Karl Rove’s 2007 appearance, a bizarre moment in which, egged on by the “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” entertainment guys, he got up on stage and “rapped” as “MC Rove.” His jerky dancing and multi-octave sound effects were bizarre; NBC Correspondent David Gregory, dancing alongside, just looked awkward.

Not all is controversial at the RTCA event. After NBC’s David Bloom died of a pulmonary embolism in 2003 while covering the Iraq War, the association established an award in his name, for excellence in enterprise reporting, that produces many damp-eyed moments each year when it is handed out. Another honor — the Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for Excellence in Washington-based National Affairs/Public Policy Broadcasting–is also bestowed each year at the dinner, in remembrance of the former CBS News producer.