Andy Borowitz said what?

The headlines are alarming:

*Support Grows for Trump Serving Third Term in Prison

*Greenland rejects Trump’s Offer to Trade JD Vance for Rare Earth Minerals

*Kim Jong Un Demands to be Included in all Future Hegseth Group Chats

To be clear, these are not headlines copied from the New York Times. Instead, they were pilfered from The Borowitz Report (borowitzreport.com), the brainchild of satirist Andy Borowitz, a latter day but much funnier Don Quixote tilting at windbags.

Every weekday morning, Borowitz dispatches an email newsletter pointing out the foibles of our leaders. But on April 28, he will do his pointing in person, at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown. It’s part of Drew University’s Drew Forum, a discussion moderated by TV news journalist Paula Zahn.

Before then, however, he participated in a Zoom interview with me, where he discussed his process, his anger with much of mainstream media, and the joke he decided not to tell.

I started by asking if the current political landscape made his job easier or more difficult.

Andy Borowitz: It’s more difficult because it’s hard to make fun of a clown. You have such ridiculous behavior coming from the White House that it becomes difficult to exaggerate or heighten it in any way. You’re already into this level of absurdity that is impossible to top. I’m not trying to change anything that Trump and his clown car are doing. So the approach I take is to act as though what they are saying and doing is logical, try to report it as a journalist and take it to its logical conclusion.

Curt Schleier: With the current political scene at the center of your work life, how do you keep from getting depressed?

AB: That’s a good question. I was very depressed on election night, because I couldn’t believe the American people had done something this cataclysmic. And when I say the American people, let me clarify: less than 50% of the American people. Because when the dust settled, Trump did not win a major majority of the popular vote. He won a plurality, you know, about 49% of the vote. Still, I couldn’t believe that 49% of the American people had done this.

I thought we had learned our lesson during covid, when millions of people died and he told everybody to drink bleach. I thought that would be kind of a Rubicon that we wouldn’t cross. But I was wrong. I overestimated everyone’s critical faculties.

I must say when I read the news, I’m not very jolly, because you hear about people being picked up off the street and disappeared and you hear about people being shipped down to El Salvador and [Homeland Security chief] Kristi Noem posing with a Rolex watch in front of political prisoners. It’s pretty hard to take. But once I get to work, and I start turning that into a column, it is weirdly, I don’t know if I should say, empowering, but cathartic would be a good word.

I’m pleased that my readers share that. I feel it’s a small contribution I can make to get people out of the depths of depression, so they, maybe, could take positive action like join a protest or register people to vote or do something constructive to make this situation better.

CS: Talk about getting disappeared, do you ever worry about repercussions or your own safety?

AB: No, I don’t, because I’m very low on the food chain. I think that Donald Trump is a TV viewer. I don’t think he’s a big Substack reader. I think he in some ways is very much a relic of the 1970s. He cares about the New York Times. He cares about what’s on CNN and “Meet the Press.” He’s not really kind of a niche news consumer. If somebody makes fun of him on “Saturday Night Live,” he gets upset. I don’t think he has the time or the attention span to be angry about every person on Substack who’s thrashing him.

But on the other hand, I find it absolutely reprehensible that so many people in the media are afraid of a bully. We’re supposed to be the people who are impervious to that kind of intimidation. I was very pleased to see Jeff Goldberg at the Atlantic do what so many people in his position have been unwilling to do, which is to just say I won’t be bullied.

There are many people who are taking a stand, but it’s appalling to me that so many people in the mainstream media, especially management, are being so chicken. And you know the owner of the Atlantic [Laurene Powell], who is a billionaire, is taking a very principled stand, but billionaires own a lot of these publications, and they’re being absolutely cowardly.

CS: You must do a lot of research and read dozens of sources to find material.

AB: I really don’t. I want to be part of a conversation that everyone understands. So if I get too well informed on a daily basis, and I start digging into, like, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, in a very minute, granular way, a lot of people won’t know what I’m talking about. They won’t get the joke.

But as somebody who likes to be well informed, for my own information, I subscribe to the Economist. I think it’s a great magazine and very informative, well written, and also has a sense of humor. I listen to the BBC. I downloaded the BBC app on my phone. They’ve got great news programming all day, but they also have podcasts.

But for my column, I just go to Google news and see what the biggest stories are and try to take off from headlines that I think are going to be pretty much in the zeitgeist, gonna be pretty known. I’m not going to write about some really obscure local election, although I will say on Sundays, when I do a deeper dive for the paid subscribers, I am completely eager to nerd out and I do the research to dig up stuff that I think will be interesting.

For example, this weekend I wrote about Elise Stefanik, who is someone I’ve been interested in for months because she’s undergone this tremendous transformation from a well-educated normal conservative Republican to an absolute crazy MAGA cultist. It’s an example of political opportunism at its worst. So I wanted to tell that story, but in order to tell it, I had to get the facts. I will drill down when it comes down to one of my longer pieces, but not during the week.

CS: Have you ever come up with a funny joke you ultimately rejected?

AB: I did a joke on Facebook about the astronauts who just got back from being stranded and within minutes decided they wanted to leave the planet again because they realized what a sh** show they landed on. It was extremely popular on Facebook, and I thought I should do this as a column. But I had a bit of anxiety about it. These astronauts are heroic people. They went into outer space, risking their lives, and now I’m putting words into their mouths saying they think Trump is a sh** show. I realized in today’s environment you don’t want to put something like that out there and then have some wacko in the real world say the astronauts are lib snowflakes and terrorize them online.

It’s one thing to make fun of a politician. They are fair game. Melania is fair game, because she’s tried to monetize her role as first lady in a very aggressive way. So are some politicians’ families. Mrs. Alito is fair game for flying the flag upside down outside her house. God knows Ginny Thomas is fair game. But an astronaut who came back to Earth — even though I wasn’t making fun of them — I didn’t want to do anything that would in any way possibly endanger them.

So that’s an example of pulling back. It does happen from time to time for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s because I think I miss the moment. It’s just too late to write about it because people have already moved on.

CS: Any chance you’ll ever run out of topics?

AB: The nice thing about politics — and this is one of my favorite quotes from Will Rogers, who said it —there’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

CS: Can you tell me a little about your Jewish background growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio?

AB: I have to be really honest and say my parents were not very observant Jews. We went to a Reform temple. When I say we, I mean, they would drop me off on Sundays to go to Sunday school. They literally never went to temple. And that struck me as somewhat hypocritical at the time, because I felt like I was being kind of the hood ornament of the family. That I was flying the flag of Judaism for the family.

We didn’t really observe the holidays, but I wrote some years ago about trying to convince my parents to celebrate Chanukah. My main objective was that my birthday comes very close to Chanukah. My parents, in addition to being very non-observant about Chanukah, were very non-observant about my birthday. They gave me one present a year. Literally. They said we’re gonna give you a combined Chanukah-birthday present and that was it for the whole year. Maybe that’s why I’ve showered my children with gifts over the years.

So no, I was not a bar mitzvah. I was not confirmed, but on the other hand it is possible not to be religious and yet have a strong Jewish identity. I’ve always had that and I’m very proud to be Jewish and proud of my heritage.

CS: Growing up, were you the class clown, constantly getting kicked out of class?

AB: No, I knew my limits. I was not a danger to anyone in high school. I was the editor of the school paper at Shaker Heights High, and once a year we got to do an April Fools issue. Basically, the whole issue was made-up stories, exactly like what I do now. So, if you do the math, that was almost 50 years ago. So I’ve shown absolutely no intellectual growth in the past 50 years. I’m doing the exact same schtick.

CS: I mentioned I was interviewing you to Calvin Trillin. He told me he was a fan, that you were a mensch, and says he still always smiles when he recalls one of your stories, concerning a conversation you had with your father about bullying. What was that?

AB: That’s amazing. But I might wind up doing that joke in Morristown. I will say it’s a great example of my father, may he rest in peace, not being the most empathetic person in the world. I was giving this very heartfelt account of something that happened to me — and he was correcting my English.

For tickets and possibly to hear the end of that story, go to www.mayoarts.org and then click on Tickets and Events.