Baratunde Thurston Talks to Nicholas Thompson About Humor and the Conversation About Race
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2016
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Baratunde Thurston is the author of “How to Be Black” and is a brilliant social-media commentator. Less than a year ago, he started working as an executive on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” where he’s had a hand in the viral success of segments like “Black Trump.” So why is he moving on so quickly? Thurston tells Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, that, among other things, he hopes to get back to his podcast, “Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race.” But he cautions that, while humor can raise awareness and help relieve pain, we can’t expect even the very best jokes to solve our problems.
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| 0:49.0 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. |
| 0:50.7 | On today's Politics and More podcast, New Yorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson talks to the comedian, writer, and digital media strategist Baratunda Thurston. |
| 1:00.0 | Thurston's career has provided many opportunities to consider how humor can enrich our national conversation about race. |
| 1:15.6 | Baratonda Thurston has a career that I don't know of anything quite like it. On the one hand, he's a comedian, a writer, a commentator, host of a podcast, and the author of a book called How to Be Black. |
| 1:23.6 | So he's definitely a personality. |
| 1:25.6 | And on the other hand, he's also a digital media executive who's been in charge of building |
| 1:30.7 | audience for media outlets like The Onion and more recently The Daily Show with Trevor |
| 1:35.8 | Noah. |
| 1:37.0 | He's in the business of talking about metrics and analytics and the thing we call content |
| 1:42.2 | creation. |
| 1:43.8 | He recently sat down with the New Yorker's website editor, Nick Thompson, to talk a little shop. |
| 1:49.0 | The last time I saw you was about nine months ago and was a dinner hosted by the head of medium. |
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