Andy Borowitz on Our Age of Ignorance
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2022
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Not only are we living in a time where people are proud of their ignorance, argues the writer and comedian Andy Borowitz, but some of our most educated politicians are now playing down their intelligence as a strategy to get elected. Borowitz, the author of the long-running satirical column The Borowitz Report, examines this phenomenon in his new book, “Profiles of Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.” “When Trump was elected, a lot of us supposedly knowledgeable people were taken by surprise,” he tells David Remnick. “But the more I researched the past fifty years, the more likely and plausible—and maybe even inevitable—his election was, because he actually had a great deal in common with his forebears.”
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| 1:11.9 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:21.0 | You probably know Andy Borowitz from his column in The New Yorker The Borowitz |
| 1:25.2 | and he's been writing satire and humor for decades. |
| 1:29.2 | He started out in the world of sitcoms. |
| 1:32.0 | As a sitcom writer, you need characters that you can throw stuff to every week, week in, week out, |
| 1:37.0 | who are dependable and we'll get the laugh. And politicians become kind of this little |
| 1:42.0 | sitcom cast because we know how they're going to behave. |
| 1:45.2 | We know that Rudy Giuliani is going to be a crazy drunk guy, |
| 1:49.2 | and Marjorie Taylor Green is going to talk about Jewish space lasers. |
| 1:52.7 | And so they become very reliable sources of comedy. |
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