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Thriving in a state of satire

Andy Borowitz skewers the daily news like so much shish kebab. Very funny shish kebab.

By JAY CRIDLIN
Published June 18, 2006

Andy Borowitz has an announcement to make: He’s looking for a girlfriend. And a fan club president. Mind you, he feels the two positions should be mutually exclusive.

“Somebody who runs my fan club should obviously be a fan,” he says, mourning a long-dormant Yahoo! fan group.

“And I’ve never had a girlfriend who’s been in any way a fan of mine. So I think we can keep those two things very distinct.”

Borowitz is kidding. Probably. The award-winning satirist has plenty of fans,

as evidenced by the popularity of his column, the Borowitz Report, which appears in many newspapers, including this one. Not to mention his appearances on National Public Radio and CNN’s American Morning.

His fake stories, which bear headlines like “Gore Could Cause Global Boring” or “CIA Offers 'Friends & Family’ Eavesdropping Plan” have made his Web site (www.borowitzreport.com) a must-check for those who like a lump of snark with their morning coffee.

The St. Petersburg Times called Borowitz at home in New York, where he recently returned from a string of sold-out engagements in Australia. Here are excerpts.

So how does one get a job as a satirist? Craigslist? Door-to-door joke sales?

One has to hire oneself, I think. I’m my own boss at the Borowitz Report, so I answer to no one but me, and only I can fire myself. And only I can pay myself. That’s the downside of it — I essentially do it for free. But it’s had a lot of spinoffs that actually do produce cash.

But you can’t just go out and do that. Or can you?

My Web site, when it started, was just three or four people logged on, mainly friends. It became sort of a viral thing, because people would send it to other people, and now hundreds of thousands of people read it. It was never intended as this world-domination scheme.

Walk me through the creation of a fake story. Like, ''Chertoff Cuts Anti-Terror Funding; Asks Osama to Cut Terror Funding.’’

Right. That’s been a big story here in New York for the past few weeks. It occurred to me that if you’re going to cut the protection of a city like New York, you’re really depending on the kindness of strangers — namely, Osama bin Laden — to go along with it, and also scale down. I’m not equally happy with every story I do, but the ones that I’m happier with have a machinelike logic that’s kind of unstoppable. This was one where it sort of makes sense, you know?

Is writing a lengthy process for you?

Oh, no. I just rush in. They’re written like AP wire stories, and they’re probably written in much the same spirit that those stories are, which is on the fly. They’re all about 275 words, and every paragraph is one sentence, and that’s pretty much it. Hopefully a funny headline and a funny joke at the end. The fact that the format is so predictable — I think there’s a comfort factor to that.

Tell me about your daily news-gathering routine.

I subscribe to the New York Times, and I check Google News. What I like about Google News is it tells me how many news organizations covered a certain story. If it’s a story that was only in, say, 30 or 40 newspapers, I usually stay away from it, because I’m afraid that it won’t be enough in the zeitgeist for people to think it’s funny.

How do you feel about easy targets, like Dick Cheney blasting a dude in the face?

Love it! Love easy targets. I have no problem with that. It’s all in how you do it. I mean, if somebody’s done the same joke a million times, it becomes a little bit harder to get a laugh. When that story came out, I heard about it around 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and then I already was live with the story that evening by 7. So at least I was one of the first out with the story. After Hurricane Katrina, the revelations of just how badly everybody had screwed up, a lot of people joked about that. It was definitely kind of dark humor, but that was an easy target, because it was what everybody was talking about. You don’t avoid a target like that, because that’s a pretty important thing to satirize.

Who do you consider your competition?

No one’s doing exactly what I’m doing, I don’t think. I’m usually lumped together with Jon Stewart and The Onion. Jon Stewart’s on TV, and I’m on the Internet, so I regard that as different enough. And The Onion, although they’re on the Internet, is a weekly publication, so they tend to do different kinds of stories than I do.

How much is being able to create good satire based on being well informed, and how much of it is just God-given ability?

Well, thank you for bringing God into this. I appreciate that. Is this a creationist-versus-intelligent-design question that you’re posing to me?

. . . I don’t know if there’s a genetic basis to being funny, but I do think that funny people do tend to just be funny. You can be a funny person and then learn to write better — be more concise, edit your material better, make the point better. But I don’t think you can teach satire or comedy writing to somebody who just isn’t funny. You can maybe teach them to write something that seems in the format of a funny thing, but may not actually make you laugh at any point.

Do you find stupid humor funny? Like Family Guy or Anchorman?

I don’t watch Family Guy regularly, but I totally admire (creator) Seth MacFarlane and what he’s doing, and I totally understand its popularity. In the case of Family Guy, sometimes the crudeness of it and the rudimentary nature of it is what’s so funny. The fact that there’s no attempt at finesse whatsoever. And Anchorman was just all-out goofy and wonderful. So yeah, I’m no snob. I’m not sitting around all day reading Dorothy Parker, if that’s what you’re driving at.

What about unintentional comedy? When’s the last time you laughed out loud at something that was not meant to be funny?

I was on a date the other night, and the waiter dropped a tray. That’ll make me laugh. That takes me right back to junior high and the junior high cafeteria, and some kitchen worker or student dropping a tray, and everybody bursting into applause inappropriately. That, to me, is the kind of comedy that is timeless. We need more of that. Enough of this “satire.”

Jay Cridlin can be reached at (727) 893-8336 or cridlin@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 18, 2006, 17:25:21]