A conversation with Andy Borowitz about bombing on stage, his Harvard Lampoon Years and how The Borowitz Report was born
This discussion is excerpted from The Funny Times Podcast, a series of conversations with some of our favorite cartoonists and humorists in honor of Funny Times turning 40. Andy Borowitz is a longtime friend of Funny Times and the creative mind behind The Borowitz Report. Here are some highlights from his discussion with Funny Times founder Ray Lesser.
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Why learning to “Eat It” is Comedy Gold
Andy Borowitz: I wanted, in my heart of hearts, to be a writer. That was where my heart was, but in terms of the college experience, it was mainly: take the required courses, be an English major, and then spend all my free time at The Lampoon [Harvard’s comedy publication] or putting on shows.
I recently ran into a friend of mine who now lives in Chicago when I was doing a show and we had dinner afterwards. I said to him, “That show that we did at the Adams House Junior Comm Room, that is still one of the best creative experiences I ever had.”
He was sort of gobsmacked. He’s like, “Wait a minute, you spent the last four-plus decades in comedy and that thing you did in 1979 with me, was the pinnacle?” But it really was, because it was just creativity. There was nothing at stake. I was a knucklehead in so many ways in college but I at least had the foresight to realize the stakes will never be this low again. We’re never going to have this opportunity just to fuck around. Nobody’s going to be grading us. This has no career objective and that was a beautiful thing.
I used to participate in a show that was done downtown and on the Lower East Side of New York called Eating It. The whole idea was that comedians would go down there and not be afraid to bomb. You would try out new material and be completely prepared to eat it. If you didn’t do well, in fact, I did eat it on occasion, but that’s the only way you learn, right? Nothing comes out fully formed.
That’s the only way creativity happens, you have to fail a lot and eventually arrive at something that maybe will work and then refine it.
Borowitz reminisces about The Lampoon
Andy Borowitz: I’d been a TV writer and producer for 15 years and was very burned out. I was in semi-retirement for a couple of years, not doing anything. Then I submitted a humor piece to the op-ed section of the New York Times, and then to the New Yorker, and started getting published in those two places. It reminded me of how much fun it was to do prose humor, the way we did in The Lampoon. I never had more fun at The Lampoon than when we would parody the Harvard newspaper, which was called The Crimson, and it took itself very seriously.
They would publish almost every day but there were a few days a year when they didn’t. The Lampoon would seize on those off days to publish Crimson parodies. We would lay out an exact facsimile of the paper so it would look exactly like The Crimson, and we’d send it off to the printer and then we would deliver it to every doorstep at Harvard. It was really The Onion before The Onion. It was very much, dead-on parody of that dry journalistic style but the stories were all absurd.
There was one example, and this was years before I was on The Lampoon, of a headline called “Walrus in Central Park Zoo Speaks.” That’s not the funniest headline in the world but what was great about the article was that it wrote in a lot of journalistic detail the who, what, when, where, and why and talked about how experts were surprised that the walrus spoke. No one had ever heard a walrus speak before and it included all that, except for what the walrus actually said. That was not in the story. I guess it was hoped that the walrus would make some comment on World Affairs but that was not to be. So that was a good example of a Crimson parody story, very deadpan and very stupid.
The Accidental Origins of The Borowitz Report
Andy Borowitz: I gravitated back to that style of straight, deadpan news parody around 2001 and started sending these little stories initially to just friends. A friend of mine, who’s a web designer, said “You could actually more efficiently send these to friends if you had a website, and then you could blast them out.” It was really just a hobby. It was completely following your bliss and doing what you really love to do. What happened is that people enjoyed it and so they shared it with friends and it grew from there.
For the first 11 years or so, I did it on my own with my laptop and took a loss on it every year because I didn’t advertise. I didn’t have any ads for it, didn’t accept ads, and I didn’t charge anything for it, so I was just doing it for free. It was really a losing proposition, because no one was paying me. That was the flaw in my business.
What it did do, was it did a lot to promote me as a comedian. When I would do a live show, I would say, “Hey, I’m gonna be in LA this week” and then the shows would sell out because I had this built-in audience. Or when I would write a book, those would sell because people would click on a link and they’d be right to Amazon. I did that for 11 years and then in 2012 The New Yorker, where I had a previous ongoing relationship since about 1998, came to me and said, “Could we start publishing it?” I did that and so finally I was getting paid something.
I went to The New Yorker for 11 years. Then in 2023, Conde Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker, was having a spate of budget cuts and I was one of the things that was chopped. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Everybody was saying to me, “You gotta go to Substack and do it on Substack”. My wife actually made an intervention that was really helpful. She said, “You know, you’ve been doing this for like 22 years? You don’t want to just do the exact same thing and just put it up on Substack.” So, I decided to do the short Crimson parody-type news breaks that I’d been doing for 23 years but also try some other long-form pieces that weren’t even comedy pieces, that were just either reporting, essays or commentary.
I had written this book called, Profiles in Ignorance, which was all about how we’ve steadily aided and abetted the ignorance of our politicians and encouraged them, even if they’re not ignorant, to seem ignorant because that’s the thing to do to get votes. That experience of writing and publishing was so much fun, that I decided I should do more things like that. I could do some research about people currently in the news and tell some things. So a couple weeks ago, we witnessed the axing of the Secretary of the Navy and he was replaced by this guy named Hung Cao. Hung Cao is, I can only put it this way, he’s a complete clown. By quoting Hung Cao, it’s very easy to get a humor piece out of that and it’s 100% fact. So, I wrote a piece on Hung Cao, and I got it out there a couple days before a lot of the mainstream media did.
It’s tremendously fun to have this platform where you can do whatever you want and you can do it very quickly. A place like The New Yorker or The New York Times, they’re phenomenal institutions, but there are layers and layers of adult supervision. As a comedian, I don’t do so well with that. I much prefer to let my own taste be my guide, and go with something that my gut tells me is something I want to put out there in the world, whether people want to see it or not.
Borowitz on the necessity of his Funny Times Subscription
Andy Borowitz: We subscribe to two print publications — Funny Times and The Economist. They’re the perfect counterparts to each other, though The Economist, despite its name, is often very funny.
Being based in the UK, they’ve got a bit of a distanced, bemused view of what’s going on over here, which is refreshing when you’re stuck in an outrage loop.
Funny Times and The Economist — that’s my joint.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This conversation is an excerpt from The Funny Times Podcast, a series celebrating the 40th anniversary of Funny Times.
If you’re interested, click here to see more of Andy Borowitz’s work.
