Podcast: Satire in a World on Edge

TRANSCRIPT: Satire in a World on Edge

Andy Borowitz:

People will come up to me on the street and they'll say to me, "Oh my God, you must be having the greatest time in the world. And Trump is the gift that just keeps on giving." Actually, comedy works really well when we have a reality that's grounded, that then we can kind of make fun of and make more absurd. And traditionally, when I've written "The Borowitz Report," I was dealing with people who were sort of, well, at least in shouting distance of normal.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm host of the Weekly Show, GZERO World on public television. In this podcast, we share extended versions of the big interviews from that show. This week I sit down with Andy Borowitz, the comedic force behind The New Yorker's highly read and satirical "Borowitz Report." I'll ask him about satire in the age of strong men, censorship and threats to the right to ridicule. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Andrew Borowitz, lovely to be with you.

Andy Borowitz:

Lovely to be with you. No one really calls me Andrew. I think my mom used to call me that, but you can call me Andy.

Ian Bremmer:

I do call you Andy.

Andy Borowitz:

For our purposes.

Ian Bremmer:

I personally call you Andy.

Andy Borowitz:

Exactly.

Ian Bremmer:

I have been known to do that in the past. So how is it to be a comedian in these political times?

Andy Borowitz:

Well, I think there's sort of a misunderstanding about it right now, because people will come up to me on the street and they'll say to me, "Oh my God, you must be having the greatest time in the world," and "Trump is the gift that just keeps on giving." And that actually is not the case. It's a little bit counterintuitive because people think we've got this kind of crazy guy in the White House. And so that lends itself very well to comedy. Actually, comedy works really well when we have a reality that's grounded, that then we can make fun of and make more absurd. And traditionally, when I've written "The Borowitz Report," I was dealing with people who were sort of, well, at least in shouting distance of normal. I mean, people like George W. Bush, who comported himself like a normal human being. He was, in my opinion, a terrible president. But he sort of comported himself like a normal human being.

Andy Borowitz:

Donald Rumsfeld. These were people that you could then sort of exaggerate, satirize in a way that would show their ridiculousness that was just sort of under the surface. But Donald Trump presents as a clown, and he presents as an unstable person, as a surreal and absurd person. He's also doing this performance art. He's playing some role of Donald Trump, which only he understands, and maybe even he doesn't understand it. So that becomes actually very difficult because you can't really take his reality, which is surreal and make it more absurd. It's already absurd. And so he defies satire.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you mentioned Bush, Rumsfeld, Trump. You kind of left open Obama.

Andy Borowitz:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

Was that intentional?

Andy Borowitz:

Well, no, I was thinking about that because probably the most legendary political satirist in American literature is Will Rogers and Will Rogers said, "There's no trick to being a satirist when you have the whole government working for you." So there's really no era where the government or the people in power aren't producing material that people like me can then latch onto and make fun of. The Obama era was interesting because Obama, first of all was a funny guy. He had funny people writing for him. He would do jokes on himself. He was very funny whenever he had to do the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and he was so kind of intent on being dignified and controlled, it made him very tricky as a target. But he infuriated so many people in the other party around him and created so much sort of anger and hysteria and derangement that there was plenty to write about still.

Andy Borowitz:

So all the multiple, completely pointless repeals of Obamacare became a thing. And the constant demands for his birth certificate, of course, coming from Donald Trump, one of the perpetrators of that, that became a thing. So though he wasn't that easy to write about or that much fun to write about, the Obama years actually provided a lot of comedy.

Ian Bremmer:

So the derangement of people that really disliked Obama was part of what made it easier.

Andy Borowitz:

Yeah. I mean, I will also say that as a writer, I yearned for the days when Obama really screwed something up badly because he was usually so controlled that even when he made a mistake, he made it in kind of a dignified way. And he wasn't like flailing about.

Ian Bremmer:

But you did point out, you said Obama, not very funny, but on the other hand, and hard to make fun of, except occasionally when he gives you an opening, but you had a lot of people on the other side that were deranged by Obama, in reaction to Obama, and that was a ripe tableau to go after. Now, clearly the number of people that have been deranged by Trump on the other side is even larger. How much of an active target is that for you?

Andy Borowitz:

Well, it's interesting. I mean, I guess I sort of have it both ways in that I'm constantly making fun of the thirst for his conviction. I mean, I'm constantly making fun of people sort of looking to Robert Mueller as the savior of humanity. And I do make fun of that. But it sort of works on two levels because I will make fun of... For example, I will make fun of the former hippies who now love the FBI. I mean, that was a target of mine. And the weird response I get to that from former hippies is they're like, "Damn right." So I haven't really-

Ian Bremmer:

And they don't see the irony in that apparently.

Andy Borowitz:

No, no. So a lot of what I'm doing is making fun of what I would call 'liberal fantasies.' And the problem is... This is one of the problems with satire in general. People think... And Malcolm Gladwell actually did an interesting podcast about satire where he kind of said that satire is a failure as a principle, as a premise. It's a failure because if you're trying to change people's minds with this kind of comedy, you usually wind up just reinforcing their confirmation bias. I guess where I come out on that is that I don't necessarily think a satirist sits down unless they're delusional, that a satirist sits down and says, "Boy, when this 250 word piece comes out, I'm really going to change a lot of minds." I never feel like I'm going to change anyone's mind.

Andy Borowitz:

I feel that I've expressed myself and I've made a point, but I never think... I think when people always say, "Oh, the pen is mightier than the sword." Actually, swords often are mightier than pens, I should point out. I don't always think that. I think when people say that comedy is this incredibly powerful weapon, I think the effects of comedy can be very incremental. And I think that comedy and comedians can change the atmosphere around an issue. But I don't necessarily think that satire is this incredible weapon that just rocks the world because I just don't think it does.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, the sword has proven mightier than the pen for a number of satirists around the world. We have more journalists now languishing in prison globally than at any point in recent times. In Egypt, the John Stewart of Egypt taken off the air with criminal charges. How do you think journalists in your position, in other parts of the world are doing to respond to these times?

Andy Borowitz:

I think journalists in general, but certainly more elsewhere, are under a lot of threat. I say that totally seriously. And really, Ian, it's a bigger issue than just comedians. I mean, comedians really haven't borne the brunt of it, the way say, investigative journalists have who are being imprisoned, who are being attacked. In our country, we've had newspaper newsrooms who've been singled out by gun toting maniacs. So we do also have an environment in our country where the president of the United States is saying that people like me and people like you, by virtue of the fact that you're working as a journalist in this program, that we are the enemy of the people. Actually our role was enshrined by the First Amendment to the Constitution. The people who wrote that, by virtue of the fact that they put that amendment first, probably did not feel that we were the enemy of the people.

Andy Borowitz:

I think Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect that newspapers without government were preferable to government without newspapers. But as you'll recall, right after 9/11, in the shock of that, it was so easy for so many Americans to capitulate and give up individual liberties out of fear. And it's very easy for a government to create that sense of fear in order to achieve the goal of getting people to relinquish their individual liberties. Some worried about it, but I also think we have to fight. I think we have to support journalists. I think we have to support journalism in the courts and financially. There's a slippery slope because one thing Donald Trump says quite a bit as sort of a running theme for him, light motif, is he'll say, "Really got to look into the libel laws in this country."

Ian Bremmer:

So when you look at a place like The Onion, which in principle, this sort of fake media organization that's all about satire, but also is writing things that clearly some people believe to be true. And you also have this whole dynamic of people putting out real news and then in response being, "Can you believe this isn't The Onion?" There's an overlap there. I mean, to what extent do you think that part of what being a satirist is, what you're aiming for, is to get something so on the nose that there are people out there that believe it to be true?

Andy Borowitz:

Well, I think there are two things. I mean, one is a question of what is your intention? In my case, I can't speak for The Onion. I know people over there. I have friends over at The Onion. I can't speak for them, but I know in my case, the intention is never to create a hoax or to fool people. As a matter of fact, we label my stories very, very clearly. The New Yorker was worried about this very issue, and they said, "What can we put on your stories that will make it clear that these are not the news?" And I said, "What if we say, 'Not the news'?" And they were like, "Nailed it." So now I know.

Ian Bremmer:

That was clever.

Andy Borowitz:

It was clever.

Ian Bremmer:

That was very clever.

Andy Borowitz:

It was witty. But this whole issue of satire seeming like it's real and so realistic that people are fooled by it, that may not be the intention, but I do think when that happens, that shows that you've had an aesthetic success. Because the goal of writing this stuff is you're trying to be as close to the original thing you're parroting as possible, which means your style, the literary style of writing this stuff is really trying to hue very close to that whole AP, New York Times, incredibly drab, understated style so that you could be describing Armageddon, but you have to write it in this incredibly controlled gray lady style. I don't delude myself into thinking that if I write some piece about Trump doing something insane, that then I'm suddenly swaying elections or something.

Ian Bremmer:

No, but you have had aesthetic success. I'm thinking back on, for example, with the Washington Post when Bezos bought it.

Andy Borowitz:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

And the Chinese state media actually believed your version.

Andy Borowitz:

My version.

Ian Bremmer:

Which was?

Andy Borowitz:

Well, my version, I remember my editor at The New Yorker at the time called me and said that Bezos had just bought the Washington Post, and could you do something about it? So my headline in the story indicated that Jeff Bezos said that he'd only bought the Washington Post because he had clicked on it by mistake. He had gone to the Washington Post website. It was a big, I guess, internet shopping error, and it wound up in his cart, and it was wasn't until he got his American Express-

Ian Bremmer:

An Amazon thing. Yeah.

Andy Borowitz:

It was a little play on Amazon. It's funny, when we're talking about satire and confirmation bias, it had two wildly different reactions. In this country, people got the joke, and people are always mad about getting stuff from Amazon that they didn't mean to buy, so they got what I was making fun of and it did very well in this country. But it had this sort of ancillary market of about, I don't know, tens of millions of readers in China who read this because it had been linked to by state media. And they must have just thought, "Oh my God, this is why our economy is so much superior to the American economy, because people like Jeff Bezos are buying things by mistake, and they're a bunch of clowns." So I think their confirmation bias actually played a role in that. They wanted to see us as buffoonish in our business dealings. That's just my theory, of course.

Ian Bremmer:

They were the hippies that now support the FBI.

Andy Borowitz:

Yeah. Exactly. I always come back to, we really can't control how people... I don't think in any art form, if I can use that pretentious term, but I think anything you put out there, you really can't control the response. You don't know how people are going to take it.

Ian Bremmer:

Have you had... I would think one other way of feeling great about a successful piece of biting satire is when the target of your satire said, "Yeah, that was funny. You got me. I appreciated that." Does that happen, and does that happen often?

Andy Borowitz:

I think I'm too low on the food chain. I think that people are always saying, "So have you heard a lot from the White House?" I never hear from the White House. I think they're kind of more obsessed with people like... Obviously, Trump is obsessed with Alec Baldwin because Alec Baldwin is actually getting up on stage and impersonating him. So he will actually take time out of his day and tweet about how the guy making fun of him on Saturday Night Live is a disaster and failing and all that. First of all, I don't think that Trump, if I had to guess, is a big reader of The New Yorker magazine.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you want to be appreciated by your targets?

Andy Borowitz:

No, I have no interest in that.

Ian Bremmer:

None?

Andy Borowitz:

No.

Ian Bremmer:

Really? Not even a tiny bit?

Andy Borowitz:

No, no, I'm not... I think one of the things, Ian, is I spent the first chunk of my adult career in Hollywood, and I was a TV producer. I think that experience really inoculated me from being that interested in famous people. I've got to say, it's not that I'm not impressed by famous people, or I think that they're worse than us. I just think as US Magazine would say, "They're just like us." They're not that much more interesting or less interesting.

Ian Bremmer:

You've said that you consider this sort of an art form, and I think that's-

Andy Borowitz:

Well, I sort of regret that already.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, there you go. So I was just wondering-

Andy Borowitz:

It's on tape.

Ian Bremmer:

Your art, how much of it do you want it to be just something that people appreciate in the moment for its own sake, and how much of it are you thinking there's a broader message that I'm trying to get across? There's purpose to what I'm doing, and I'm hoping this is part of affecting change.

Andy Borowitz:

Well, leaving aside the whole art thing in terms of my... Let's use the word "work." Because that, I'm cool with that.

Ian Bremmer:

How about "oeuvre?" We'll go with "oeuvre."

Andy Borowitz:

Yes. Let's go for "oeuvre". In terms of what I'm trying to achieve when I write something, I'm really trying to entertain, first and foremost, I'm trying to entertain for that day, for that moment, because by the nature of what I do, it's so ephemeral. I think all creative work is pretty ephemeral. There are very few novelists from a hundred years ago that we're still reading when you consider how many people were writing novels then. So it's all... Let's face it. I mean, I believe in the sands of time and entropy and all of those inexorable forces. So it's all ephemeral. But what I do is super ephemeral, because even I will go back two years and read a piece I wrote and be like, "What was I even writing about? What was the news peg of that?" Because it's just so much of the moment.

Andy Borowitz:

So my goal is really to entertain for that moment. I think it's changed a little bit in the last 18 months, two years of this Trump era, simply because I feel that we're living in a national emergency. So to the extent that I can use my comedy to activate people, to get people who are maybe so depressed that they wouldn't think of, say, working for a candidate or raising money for a candidate, or working for the International Rescue Committee, which as you know, is one of my favorite organizations. I've tried to raise money for things that I believe in. I've gotten a little bit more of a sense of trying to do something positive to make our country and our world a little bit better.

Andy Borowitz:

But that doesn't so much inform the writing. It's not like, I don't sit down and say, "Okay, now I'm going to make a grand statement here." Because, as I said before, I just don't think that satire, and especially my satire, I don't think it has that capacity. But I think I tend to use more my role as a satirist, my role as somebody who has an audience, I try to use that to do incremental good like raise a little money for somebody or something.

Ian Bremmer:

Andy Borowitz, artist, commercial satirist.

Andy Borowitz:

Oeuvre.

Ian Bremmer:

Great to be with you.

Andy Borowitz:

Oeuvre creator.

Ian Bremmer:

Absolutely. Oeuvre creator. Good to be with you.

Andy Borowitz:

Thanks, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week. Same place, same time, unless you're watching on social media. In which case, wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

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The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.