This week my wife and I were watching the particulars of the annual White House Correspondent Association Annual Banquet — not on TV, but on the convenient YouTube screen, "free on demand" — which always happens the fourth Saturday in April.

 More than 1.5 million "views" of the President's speech took place in two days, and more than 500,000 for the star comedian, Joe McHale. This is how popular the event has become via the Internet channel.

This in reality has been a tradition of more than 90 years, started in 1920, when Woodrow Wilson was our president.

Not surprisingly, women were kept out of it until 1962, when the legendary Helen Thomas finally raised her hand and urged then President John F. Kennedy not to attend unless the association allowed women like her, already admitted as association members, to attend the dinner with the president as well. What was the big deal, after all?

The tradition was enriched since then with the presence of dozens of women reporters working for multiple news media outlets in the nation's capital in the 1960s.

Much more criticism has been leveled against the annual tradition, as of late increasingly because of the alledged "coziness" between the government and the press that is supposed to be watching over it, and the Hollywood-style show the banquet has become — another vanity fair where celebrities go to see and be seen.

"A crystallization of the press's failures in the post 9/11 era," wrote NY Times Columnist Frank Rich, who was concerned that what he called a "propaganda-driven White House" can enlist the Washington press "in its shows."

My wife and I, however, watched it from a different perspective.

As immigrants from Latin America, where jesters don't have it easy with those in power, we see the roasting of the president and other powerful political leaders in this annual banquet as a sign of the health of the Democratic experiment in North America.

We are elated at the fact that this public and pungent criticism of the politicians happens for all the nation to see, with nobody actually taking the humor so seriously as to retaliate against the masters of the divine gift.

As the comedian Joel McHale — chosen this year over much more brilliant humorists like George Lopez — said last Saturday, he could say the kind of things he said about President Obama, or Governor Christie of New Jersey, without fear of being "sent to the Gulag" by the powerful men whose inadequacies McHale got a laugh from.

The President, always self-deprecating, pre-empted the punches of the comedian who followed him at the podium, and had no other choice but to laugh himself and at everything thrown against him on live TV.

Governor Christie, for his part, was forced this time to stay put and listen while the comedian ripped him apart mercilessly, and ridiculed his being overweight as much as his aspirations to be president of the United States after the major scandal about the bridge closure.

When Comedian Stephen Colbert took on President George W. Bush, more than seven years ago and poked fun at the D.C. press itself, the laughs dried up, and for a second you could hear only silence in the room.

He took on not only on the President  — and made Mr. Bush and Mrs Bush look noticeably uncomfortable — but also picked apart the national press gathered there, calling its most respected representatives, not writers but stenographers typing the White House version of the reality, and getting away with it.

Picture that happening in other countries in the hemisphere, particularly in those where journalists are jailed, or comedians are even killed, for daring to fulfill their responsibility of returning society to its senses through the much needed catharsis of plain good humor.