Vice-presidential auditions at the Gridiron dinner? Haley and Castro provide some laughs.

Vice President Joe Biden, shown here at the 2016 Oscars, headlined the annual Gridiron dinner. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

The Gridiron Club dinner — that annual confab of top Washington journalists performing skits and songs for one other and for the pols who love them — might feel like a throwback. (What is this, Downton Abbey? Who even owns white-tie getup? And does someone here know that there are songs were written after 1978?)
But even in its 131st year, it’s still, apparently,  a draw: on Saturday night, dinner speakers included the political up-and-comers most buzzed about for vice-presidential slots in that 2016 election you might have heard a little something about.
“Fresh-faced” and “Gridiron” in the same sentence? Well, it’s been a weird year.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who according to conventional wisdom (aka her Gridiron hosts) would make a pretty great number-two on the GOP ticket, was on the dais, as was HUD Secretary Julian Castro, the oft-talked about potential running mate for Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

[Castro brothers insist they’re no comedy duo at media dinner]

The dinner was headlined by the current occupant of the office, Vice President Joe Biden, who showed the whippersnappers how the Veep thing is done. Rule One: self-deprecation is hilarious. He compared his own modest means to that of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. “When a socialist has more money than you, you know you’ve been doing something wrong for a long, long time,” he joked.
And, at least in this crowd, jokes about Sen. Ted Cruz being a terrible colleague slay. “I told Barack, if you really, really want to remake the Supreme Court, nominate Cruz. Before you know it, you’ll have eight vacancies.”

Bwa-hah. Cue the wannabes.
Castro, joined by his twin brother, Rep. Joaquin Castro, for a brother act they’ve refined on the Washington-dinner circuit, proved he was willing to take shots at GOP rivals, a skill he’d bound to be asked to deploy on the presidential trail.
Their skewering of Republicans started with Cruz. “Why do people take such an immediate dislike to Ted Cruz?” the congressman wondered aloud, according to prepared remarks. “Probably because it saves time,” the secretary quipped. (This was something of a meta moment, as the punchline was an actual quote about the Texas Republican, offered up by a fellow Republican in a Frank Bruni column last year. It’s the kind of crowd that gets it.)  
And then the duo turned to another GOP candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, and the Florida Republican’s much-mocked boots. “The last time Washington was this riled up about a man in high heels, it was J. Edgar Hoover,” yukked Julian.

The turnout at the Marriott Renaissance hotel was a rare show of bipartisanship during one of the messier presidential elections in recent memory. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz supping on the very same rubber chicken?
Only at the dinner thrown by the Gridiron, a 65-member club, whose new inductees on Saturday included Tracie Mauriello of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CNN’s Jake Tapper, Glenn Thrush of Politico, Reuters’ Caren Bohan, David Lauter of Tribune Publishing, and Ellen Weiss of the E. W. Scripps Company.