It’s a funny thing, reality
The bald guy outside the window is clearly no one to mess with. Cellphone at the ready, he’s scoping out Hollywood Boulevard and speaking into a microphone looped over his left ear with an air of gravitas. If he isn’t Secret Service, he should consider a career change.
Tucked in a booth at the Hamburger Hamlet in Hollywood, Andy Borowitz is safe from the bald man’s prying eyes. Borowitz smiles, surveying the artillery circling the man’s gleaming head, and starts speaking into his fist. “There’s got to be a crowd-control problem,” he says. “We got Cedric. We got Cedric approaching east.”
Cedric the Entertainer wouldn’t really need crowd control for a few more hours, when the “Barbershop 2” premiere was scheduled to unfurl across the street. But hey, who says reality couldn’t use a rewrite?
Borowitz’s new-and-improved version of the truth appears every day on his satirical, faux-news website, “The Borowitz Report” (www.borowitzreport.com), which has prompted the media to dub him “a one-man Onion.” That’s not to say Borowitz doesn’t play well with others. He also writes humor for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, National Public Radio and Newsweek.com, among others, and his nearly 3-year-old Web page recently led to a three-times-a-week gig on CNN.
In a typical 300-word dispatch, Borowitz demolishes the walls dividing politics, business, celebrity and notoriety, stirs the resulting ingredients and serves up a heady stew of popped culture. In a recent “scoop,” he announced that Saddam Hussein’s prosecution was moved to Modesto so the fallen despot could get a fair trial. As the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, “explains:” “In Modesto, almost no one has heard of Saddam because the only news they have been getting for the last year has been about Scott Peterson.”
Of course, California doesn’t need any help from Borowitz when it comes to mixing and matching ostensibly separate arenas like politics and celebrity. The day Californians crowned a movie star as governor, the Borowitz satire machinery cranked into gear. The result is his latest paperback salvo, “Governor Arnold: A Photodiary of His First 100 Days in Office” (Simon & Schuster), which uses movie stills, news photos and Borowitz’s satirical text to illustrate such gubernatorial “accomplishments” as the “release of California’s strategic Botox reserves.”
“What I think is funny about him is that Arnold is constantly reminding us he was a movie star,” says Borowitz, a recovering writer-producer and co-creator of “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” “Recently, he made a comment I loved, which was, ‘If I could sell tickets to “Red Sonja” and “Last Action Hero,” then I can sell California.’ Now, why would anyone remind people that he was in ‘Red Sonja’ and ‘Last Action Hero’? He’s so traded on celebrity that I really think he deserves this kind of coverage.”
The Governator book comes on the heels of last year’s Wall Street parody, “Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison,” in which Borowitz offered tips on “how to avoid getting back-stabbed -- literally” and “the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Prisoners.” A compilation of Borowitz Reports is due out this fall.
“I believe he’s going to get bigger because his profile is growing exponentially,” says his publisher, David Rosenthal, executive vice president of Simon & Schuster’s Adult Trade Division. “It’s because he’s funny, he’s good. It ain’t because of his looks.”
Clearly, they haven’t hurt. A rangy New Yorker who’s particularly well endowed in the olfactory region, Borowitz has parlayed his substantial profile as a cresting humorist into a new career as a film actor. He appears opposite Julianne Moore in the coming “Marie and Bruce,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
“I play a really boring guy at a party she’s trying to get away from,” Borowitz says. “It’s such a huge stretch for me to turn off my sex appeal. After that, I got cast in Woody Allen’s next film with Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny and Amanda Peet. I play a guy at a party who no one appears to be trying to get away from, so I think I’m moving in the right direction.”
A comic pioneer
Sipping coffee at the Hamlet, Borowitz marvels at the doors that are opening to him at the creaky age of 46.
“My career is taking a bizarre path, which is that I’m getting more visible as I get older,” he says. “When I was in Hollywood, I put myself so far behind the scenes that no one had seen me or heard from me for the first 15 years of my career. So in a way, even though I’m not a young sprite, my comedy is young because people aren’t sick of it yet.”
“Andy is a pioneer,” says Newsweek media and politics columnist Jonathan Alter, who knew Borowitz at Harvard. “The occupation of choice for your basic Harvard grad used to be bond salesman on Wall Street. Now it’s going to write in L.A. He was a pioneer in that, but now he’s pioneering in something else, which I call comedy entrepreneur, becoming your own little industry and not having to answer to a bunch of Hollywood blowhards.”
Today Borowitz is casually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and he appears amiable and relaxed, bereft of the demons that drive comedians who mainline other people’s laughs for relief. A former president of the Harvard Lampoon, he’s a happy guy with a family in the suburbs and enough money from his earlier incarnation to do what he wants, which is pay $1,000 a month for an ad-free website that allows him to cultivate a voice and a following. (Much of his income now comes from speaking engagements.)
His life’s second act is virtually the opposite of his young adulthood working in highly collaborative, bottom-line-oriented Hollywood, which he escaped at age 40.
“It would be really hypocritical to paint myself as this angry guy who’s so screwed over by the world and is coming back with a lot of outrage,” says Borowitz, who lives with his writer-wife and “Fresh Prince” co-creator, Susan, and their two children in a Tudor manor house in Westchester, N.Y. “However, I am outraged by the things that are going on in the world that have nothing to do with me but do affect millions of people. If I didn’t really feel it, I’d have nothing to satirize.”
But sometimes reality is hard to top. Borowitz is particularly amused by the alliances struck between Hollywood and Washington. “Stars can’t resist the temptation to endorse candidates because they think their success translates into a kind of wisdom in a completely disparate field that they know nothing about. Case in point: Madonna and Wesley Clark. I love the fact that this guy who was the supreme commander of NATO needs the endorsement of the star of ‘Who’s That Girl?’ to get added credibility.”
Borowitz believes that if you’re starting with reality, you’ve already got plenty to work with. That places him squarely in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. “Twain said that usually the funniest thing is just to tell the truth,” he says. “The mistake a lot of people make with satire is they think they have to make it really insane and exaggerated. [‘Ball Four’ author] Jim Bouton said, ‘If you want to make people laugh, take reality and multiply by about 1.3.’ I think that’s about right.”
Not everyone gets it
On the other hand, subtlety can be lost on some of the website’s 100,000 daily visitors and e-mail subscribers -- even members of the supposedly skeptical media. A recent Borowitz Report that the nation’s first Democratic presidential campaign primary would be held on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” resulted in a deluge of press credential requests to attend, which raised some hackles in Burbank.
Clearly, some people are skipping past the parody disclaimers on his work, which doesn’t stop him from volunteering another one: “People should not rely on online columns to help their serotonin levels.”
“One of the more gratifying kinds of mail I get -- in addition to people saying I should not be exercising my First Amendment rights -- is letters from people saying comedy helps them when they’re depressed,” Borowitz says. “One person said she’d been on antidepressants but now she reads the column and that’s enough. I think that’s putting way too much pressure on me as a treatment option.”
Still, Borowitz embraces the palliative effects of comedy as an alternate way to make sense of events, particularly after Sept. 11.
“Comedy got darker,” he says. “It became more about danger and bad things in the world, and everyone really dealt with this stuff and didn’t avoid it. I think comedy all over, not just on our site, got a little richer and a little more interesting. Because you need the darkness on the backside of a mirror to reflect. That’s true of comedy: You need that kind of dark undertow, and in a way I think my comedy grew up a little bit.”