Politics and parody
Humorist Andy Borowitz profiles the dumb and dumber in new book
Had Andy Borowitz titled his new book about American politicians “Profiles in Courage,” it might have more resembled a pamphlet.
As is, he offers “Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber,” which was published last year. Only a year later, the topic required an additional chapter for its recent paperback publication.
The satirist got his start writing for TV in the 1980s. He found a new lane when he formalized some comic news-minded emails to friends into “The Borowitz Report,” which found its way into numerous publications before becoming a fixture at The New Yorker a decade ago. Borowitz introduces the book with a Harry S. Truman quote: “Being dumb’s just about the worst thing there is when it comes to holding high office,” followed by another former president offering contradictory commentary: “The worst thing a man can do is go bald.”
He discussed the book and its three stages of ignorance (ridicule, acceptance and celebration) and what optimism may arise as we muddle about the third stage in advance of his recent talk at Houston’s Progressive Forum.
Q: I had a fairly uneventful evening planned with my wife and daughter at home, and then I read the new chapter in which Dr. Oz is quoted as saying, “My daughters hate my smell.” Now I have new things to worry about.
A:
It’s a shame what happened with Dr. Oz. That was such a bizarre time. My wife had the idea of me writing an update rather than the paperback being the same stuff. There was so much happening on a monthly, weekly, daily basis. And the midterms were an interesting contrast to some of what I’d said before. I’m rarely good at predicting things. But I did make an optimistic prediction about the braking system of democracy.
Having grown up with Ralph Perk in Cleveland and his hair catching on fire, you can only be so big a dork and get elected. So we had this midterm where Trump did an amazing job of candidate selection, finding some of the most egregiously ignorant people. Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker. … I think we reach a point in societies where the pendulum only swings so far. It has to come back to the middle. I guess not in some societies that aren’t tempted at all by democracy, where they have years and years of autocratic government. But ours, we make a go of it, and we wind up with these swings.
Q: We talk about red
states and blue states and swing states. But they’ve changed a lot just in the two decades I’ve been back in Texas.
A:
Sure, Texas, not so long ago was the state of Molly Ivins and Ann Richards. It has come a long way in a different direction. But I’m of the view, history doesn’t move in a straight line. There’s a chance with younger voters and new demographics that Texas progressivism may not be dead at all.
Think about Ohio, where I grew up. When I was little, we had the most liberal member of the Senate, Howard Metzenbaum. We had John Glenn, an astronaut, and Howard Metzenbaum, who owned parking lots. Now Ohio has J.D. Vance and feels like a red state. But that’s never a permanent condition. All of these landscapes are up for reconsideration, which is exciting. Or you have to see it as exciting. If you go through life a pessimist all the time, thinking everything’s a disaster, I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning. For some people, the midterms were undeniably cause for optimism.
Q: There are a lot of preconceptions about Texas outside of Texas. But I tell people in New York that Texas produced more Biden voters than New York did.
A:
When I announced this show in Houston, I got a lot of predictable knee-jerk reactions. “I’d never set foot in Texas.” Well, dude, there are millions of progressive voters in Texas. You have to
distinguish between a government and the people. It’s that way a lot of places in the world. My wife is of Italian descent, and I love the food. I’m not going to avoid Italy because of the right-wing people running things there. I just don’t have that reductive view.
I’m fond of Texas. I’ve gone a number of times for events, including a Texas book fair where Molly Ivins appeared near the end of her life. I think she’s up there with Mark Twain as one of the best humorists America has produced. So I can’t look at a state that produced great people like that and think, “It’s not worth visiting.” That’s not how it works.
Q: Do you worry when you introduce satirical phrases like “Nazi Insider” magazine that somebody will think, “Oooh, I wonder if that web domain is available?”
A:
( Laughs.) I’m surprised no one has done that already. A lifestyle magazine! There’s such a thin line, which is a problem with what I do. You make these things up, and because our culture is so saturated by media, so much of it sounds true. There are egregious examples of this. And it’s funny, too, because I write for the most thoroughly fact-checked magazine in the world. David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker) is obsessed with facts. And I am also, which is why my book has 60 pages of end notes.
In 2017, I wrote a piece … there was a real story about Donald Trump expressing paranoia that Obama left listening devices in the White House. I did a piece about him ordering all the phones covered in tin foil. And at one point, I had him say Barack Obama was actually hiding somewhere in the White House. It was so outlandish that no one could possibly believe it was true. And it got picked up and swallowed whole by the Chinese media. And once something gets picked up in China, that means a lot of people read it.
Remnick had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, he suddenly had 20 million page views in China. That’s good for the business model. But then there was the thing about The New Yorker being factual. So they started putting labels on my pieces, “not news, satire,” which could be a buzz kill. Part of the problem is that reality is becoming so implausible that, really, nothing seems out of the ordinary. Try to improve on reality. It’s getting hard to know who you’re dealing with.
Q: The book feels at times like it’s almost about puppetry as much as politics. Some of the people saying dumb, outrageous things have very smart people who understand the messaging behind them.
A:
It really became a big research project for me. It wasn’t like I had preconceived notions about any of this. I delved into this history and that was the fun of it. There are people like Stuart Spencer who are really interesting. He was a pioneer who was Ronald Reagan’s puppet master early on. He went on to run 400 Republican campaigns and met with Manuel Noriega. He was really versatile. (Laughs.) But he took a guy who was like a Peter Sellers character, who didn’t know anything and knew he was palatable on TV. That was 1966. Twenty-two years later, he had the same assignment with Dan Quayle; it just didn’t work as well. Talent that works on TV is an evanescent thing and an ineffable thing. Reagan had it in spades. He knew how to look down the barrel of a TV camera. He had real talent. Some aren’t good at it. Some can get better at projecting sincerity when they don’t know what the (expletive) they’re talking about. Quayle was different. He was a rich kid, where Reagan grew up deprived. So he was wildly confident. But he was very successful in Indiana, where his grandfather owned a lot of media. He had a stellar Senate career, which is one of the reasons he was chosen as vice president. But it was one of those cases where he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. But when he was exposed to the media, it was more like a space capsule on reentry. He was exposed to the atmosphere and set ablaze. He was immediately terrible at it and never got better.
Now you look at a guy like (Ron) DeSantis and see some of that. Let me be clear: Democrats have their share of these guys, too. But performing well on TV and knowing something is difficult. Then you have people who are too far into the celebration phase of ignorance. You have very smart people like Ted Cruz, to use a local example. He knows better. He knows the source of our ills is not Mr. Potato Head. On some level, he knows these things have to sound stupid. But that’s what works, which is too bad. But that’s where the midterms were encouraging. Dr. Oz is another example: He was someone who is extremely educated. But the celebration phase we’re in now is bad because everything we’re taught when we are young about being educated is being done in by highly educated people like DeSantis and Cruz.