How is it to be a
comedian in these
political times.
- Well, I think there's
There's a mistake - a sort of 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 not 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. 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 in shouting distance of normal
At the moment there's a lot of tension between the United States and many of its traditional allies
Immigration other issues leave the European Union far from United but China and Russia seem to be enjoying ever warmer relations
Does the West face a dangerous new alliance in the East?
I'm Ian Bremmer in downtown Manhattan and welcome to GZERO World.
On this week's show we'll discuss that Russia-China issue.
Also the current state of satire with best-selling author, comedian, and New Yorker contributor Andy Borowitz. And on PUPPET REGIME,
things get a little bleeping. Public television loves it when I say that.
But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.
Let's talk about Russia and China.
A few weeks ago
These two countries made headlines with joint military exercises - big ones.
Imagine 300,000 Russian soldiers; 36,000 tanks; and
1,000 planes backed up by troops tanks and jets from China's People's Liberation Army
playing war games in Siberia where there's a lot of space for that sort of thing.
It was the largest military exercise anywhere in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That definitely got attention in Washington. In fact, for America, this is a kind of recurring nightmare.
What if Russia and China became real allies?
Political, economic, and military allies? That might trigger a brand new Cold War
So, is that what's happening?
Russia and China both have a beef with the United States to be sure.
The Trump administration
Has slapped sanctions on Russia as well as tariffs on more than 200 billion in
Chinese exports. Also both countries want to stop the United States from playing global policeman
patrolling their neighborhoods and backyards and criticizing the way their governments behave
To push back against the US military presence near their borders
Russia and China work together with a few smaller countries in an organization called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
It's not NATO but it's not nothing.
Russia and China are also natural partners when it comes to energy.
Russia is one of the world's leading exporters of oil and natural gas.
China consumes vast amounts of oil and natural gas. Buyer and seller fit well together.
Are Americans and Europeans now facing a Russia-China alliance? Not quite.
Look closer and you'll see that in coming years Russia and China will compete as much as they cooperate.
They'll compete for influence in Central Asia. That's the region that lies between them.
For China they're building a new Silk Road there the trade route that will connect China to Europe with enormous volumes of trade and cash
flowing in both directions. For Russia, these are former Soviet republics -
Outposts of the Russian Empire. These are political, economic, and military
allies that Russia intends to keep. Now look again at oil and gas.
Yes, China wants to buy Russian energy, but China wants a low price. Russia, the seller, they want a high price.
China can find all sorts of other energy suppliers. Lots in the Middle East.
That means China can drive a much harder bargain on price.
More importantly Russia's foreign policy is revisionist. They want to restore their influence in neighboring countries
establishing a deeper presence in the Middle East and if possible
destabilizing the politics of the United States and the European Union
Chinese leaders by contrast want a stable, predictable
international environment because that's how China continues to grow its economy.
Then there's the larger economic mismatch
China's economy is almost 8 times larger than Russia
China is a giant. Russia's economy is smaller than Canada's. Canada's!
Canada! This is no partnership
of equals and both sides know it. To put it simply: China doesn't need Russia the way Russia needs China.
China's future and security and prosperity
depends far more on the strength of its economy than the strength of its military
The United States is by far China's top trade partner - even with the ongoing trade conflicts. Japan is number 2
Germany's number 5. Russia is China's 11th largest trade partner.
China actually sends more exports to the Netherlands than to Russia.
So China might be willing to join war games in Siberia
and I'm sure they'll continue to cooperate when it comes to pushing back against American power, but
China's future depends far more on good relations with the United States and Europe than with Russia. For the foreseeable future
that's not going to change.
This week I sit down with Andy Borowitz.
He's a New York Times bestselling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker magazine since 1998.
He's pretty old. His satirical column, "The Borowitz Report" is read by millions of readers
around the world today. I'll ask him about satire in the age of strongmen,
censorship, and threats to the right to ridicule. Something we certainly care about here on GZERO World. Let's get to it
Andrew Borowitz, lovely to be with you.
Lovely to be with you. You know, no one really calls me Andrew.
I think my mom used to call me that, but you can call me Andy.
I do call you Andy.
I personally call you Andy. I've been known to do that.
So how is it to be a comedian in these
political times.
Well, I think there's
There's a mistake, sort of 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 not 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. 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 in shouting distance of normal.
I mean people like George W Bush who
comported himself like a normal human being. I mean, he was, in my opinion, a terrible president
but he sort of comported himself like a normal human being. Donald Rumsfeld. These are 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 sort of 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.
Now you mentioned Bush, Rumsfeld, Trump. You kind of left open Obama. Was that intentional or?
Well, no. You know I was thinking about that because
probably the most legendary political satirist in American literature was Will Rogers and Will Rogers said
there's no trick to being a satirist when you have the whole government working for you and
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 on to 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
derangements that there was plenty to write about still so like all the the multiple
completely pointless repeals of Obama care became a thing and
you know the constant demands for his birth certificate.
Of course, coming from Donald Trump, one of the perpetrators of that
became a thing. So though he wasn't that easy to write about or that much fun to write about the Obama year has actually provided a lot of comedy
So the Obama, the derangement of
people that really disliked Obama was part of what made it easier.
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 it.
You did 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, right? How much of an active target is that for you?
Well, it's interesting. I mean I
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
You know people sort of looking to Robert Mueller as 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 I mean
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 to I get to that from former hippies is they're like, "Damn right!"
That's exactly
so I haven't really
They don't really see the irony.
So like a lot of what I'm doing is making fun what I would
call liberal fantasies and the problem is
You know, this is one of the problems with satire in general
people think. And Malcolm Gladwell actually did an interesting
podcast about satire where he he kind of said that satire is a failure as a 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
But a satirist sits down and says, "boy when this this piece, this
250-word piece comes out. I'm really gonna change a lot of minds."
I never feel like I'm gonna change anyone's mind.
I feel that I've expressed myself and
I've made a point but I never think, I think people 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 the comedy is this incredibly powerful weapon
I think the effects of comedy can be very incremental and I think they can 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
So, 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 Jon Stewart of Egypt taken off the air, and
with criminal charges,
How do you think
journalists in your position in other parts of the world are doing
to respond to these times?
I think journalists in general, but certainly more elsewhere
are under a lot of threat and I say that totally seriously. I think and really Ian, it's a bigger issue than just comedians.
I mean comedians really haven't borne the brunt the brunt of it the way say investigative journalists have who are being imprisoned,
who are being attacked, you know.
In our country we've had
newspaper newsrooms who've been singled out by you know gun-toting maniacs and so
it's, you know, we we do also have an environment our country where you know
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 and actually
our role was enshrined by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
So 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. I think Thomas Jefferson said that
something to the effect that
newspapers without government were preferable to government without newspapers.
But as you'll recall like 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 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 and
you know, it is a slippery slope because one thing Donald Trump says quite a bit as of a running theme
for him, light motif, is he'll say, you know, really gonna look into the libel laws in this country.
So you look at a place like The Onion, you know, which in principle this, you know, sort of fake media organization
that's all about satire. But also is writing things that clearly people,
some people - believe to be true.
Right? - Right.
And you also have this whole dynamic of people putting out real news and then 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.
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've 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 at 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 have we say, "not the news" and they were like "nailed it!"
So now like I know that was clever it was
That was very clever.
It was witty.
But you know this whole issue of
things
satires seeming like
It's real and 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 your parodying 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.
s So that you could be just, you know describing Armageddon, but you have to write it in this incredibly controlled Grey Lady style.
We're not trying, 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.
No, but you have had aesthetic success.
I'm thinking back on for example with the the Washington Post when Bezos bought it and
the Chinese state media actually believed your version.
My version. 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? And
so my headline and the story indicated that Jeff Bezos
Said that he had 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 was wound up in his cart and
It was it wasn't until he got his American Express.
It's an Amazon thing.
Yeah, it was it was a play on Amazon
Yeah, and it did you know, it's funny when you talk about things we're talking bout 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
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 like they're I think their confirmation bias
actually played a role in that.
They wanted to see us as buffoonish in our business dealings and that seemed to. This is my theory.
Of course, they were the the hippies that now support the FBI.
Yeah, exactly.
I always come back to it, I really can't control how people
I don't think in any art form, if I can use that pretentious term,
but I think it's anything the ending you put out that you really can't control the response.
You don't know how people are take it
Have you had, I mean, I would think one other 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 it happen often?
You know? I think I'm too low on the food chain
like I think that
people are always saying like, "so have you heard a lot from the White House?"
Like no one from the White House, I never hear from the White House. I think they're kind of more obsessed with people like obviously
Trump's obsessed with Alec Baldwin because Alec Baldwin is actually getting up on stage and
Impersonating him and 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 of that
I just think, first of all,
I don't think the Trump if I had to guess is a big reader of the New Yorker magazine.
But you want to be appreciated by your targets?
No, I have no interest in that.
None?
Not even a tiny bit?
No, no, I'm not
You know
I'm I think one of the things in is I spent the first chunk of my
adult career in Hollywood and I was a TV producer and I think that experience really
inoculated me from being that interested in famous people
I've got to say like I'm not, 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 they're not that they're not that much more interesting or less interesting now
I mean, you've said that you consider this sort of an art form and
Wow I think I sort of regret that already.
- It's on tape. - So 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 effecting change.
Well leaving aside the whole art thing
Terms, might let's say guts use the word work. Okay that I'm about
Yeah, let's go for of in terms of in terms of like 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 like the there very few
novelists from 100 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 you know, the sands of time and entropy and all of those in you know 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. So my goal is really to
entertain for that moment. I think it's changed a little bit in the last
18 months, you know 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 and I try to raise money for things that I believe in. I've gotten a little bit more of a sense of
you know trying to do something positive
to make our country and our world a little bit better, but that doesn't so much inform the writing
it's not like I don't sit down and say okay now I'm gonna make a grand statement here.
It's really because as I said before I just don't think that satire or 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 of my role as somebody who has an audience I try to use that to do
Incremental good like raise little money for somebody or something.
Andy Borowitz
Artist.
Commercial satirist.
Of creator. Of creator.
Good to be with you.
Thanks, Ian.
And now to PUPPET REGIME, where we learn that most of geopolitics is people yelling four-letter words.
Hi folks. Now that GZERO World is on public television
that means bleeping out some of your favorite four letter words, but to make it fun
we're gonna let you guess what they are. First up a discussion between Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin.
Look the fake news media, they always attack me whenever I say what I think about [BLEEP]
But maybe you shouldn't be so boorish when you talk about [BLEEP]
You know, you're not such a great example of [BLEEP] yourself, Angela
I don't like this type of locker room tALK.
Donald
Please please the last thing we need is for her to be more committed to [BLEEP].
Fantastic! Next round: we have French president Emmanuel Macron
Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg!
In France, one of the things we think most about is, uh, [BLEEP]
Look, I'll be honest with you. I'm always thinking about [BLEEP] too, even when I'm doing other stuff
It's like I can't get it off my mind
We knew that [BLEEP] would get Trump's attention.
You know Facebook is still a great place to find [BLEEP].
And now oh, look it's National Security Adviser, John Bolton!
I'm not sure who the [BLEEP] invited you here.
But can we just [BLEEP] destroy [BLEEP] already? [BLEEP] those [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP].
Here good thing these idiots have stopped talking so much about the ICBM
That's our show this week we'll be right back here next week same place same time
Don't miss it. In the meantime if you like what you've seen check us out at
GZEROMEDIA.com.
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