W.W. Norton
It’s hard to be funny and even harder to parody Donald Trump, who is so prone to self-parody that many Trump jokes fall flat. But in a whopping five columns a week for The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri finds new ways to capture the daily barrage of corrupt and outrageous behavior emerging from the White House. A recent favorite: “Powerless to Help, Donald Trump Worries About Incompetent Pandemic Leadership.”
In a pandemic, humor can reveal the absurdity of policy choices and bad governance in a way that serious writing cannot. Petri takes the words of the administration, of Congress, and of presidential candidates to their logical conclusions, and the result can be scary. She’s teased out the difference between mail-in voting and absentee ballots and praised the great leadership of Jared Kushner, reader of 25 books. She’s also reminded us that Joe Biden is fine. Her second book, Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, comes out next month, compiling her funniest columns from the past several years.
I spoke with her last week. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jonathan Guyer: There doesn’t seem to be a strong tradition of black humor in the U.S.—everyone’s always saying “it’s too soon.” What’s it like to be making jokes during a pandemic? Do you feel any constraints?
Alexandra Petri: Of course, all of the time. It’s serious. Everything is sort of wildly uncertain, heightened, and exaggerated. But in extreme moments of chaos, humor is a mechanism that people use to cope. And I’m trying never to lose sight of the fact that this is really happening.
So how do you balance that when you’re responding to the worst thing that’s happened probably in our lifetime?
I’m infuriated about what’s going on, and maybe if I can just describe this right, people will see how absurd it is. It’s less, “This is funny,” and more, “This is completely absurd.”
You’re a humorist on this very serious op-ed page. But often it seems that your columns are more serious than some of the policy writers or some of the columnists.
Sometimes the only way to talk about how bananas what’s going on is, is by using the tools of satire. If you try your best and actually describe the reality as it is, you wind up with something that looks much more like a humor column. It feels like the heightened version of a thing that you would make up, like an Onion headline.
I love that the hot take that will emerge from this is that I have no sense of humor whatsoever and am just like grim and constantly filled with rage and anxiety.
What is your process? Is it as more of a political commentator or a journalist? You turn around columns so quickly. Quicker than it would take someone to write a tweet, you’ve already written a take.
Well, some of that is just I love deadlines. To quote Douglas Adams, “I love deadlines. The whooshing noise they make as they go by.” But I used to have to write even more, and now I’m sort of down to basically one a day. But if I’m not able to come up with anything, they won’t fire me. So that’s sort of my jam.
It’s less a problem of how are you going to come up with stuff to write about, and more of just, there’s an enormous avalanche of alarming events every day and you have to pick out a couple of them.
Alexandra Petri
How do you decide what is the storm of the day when there are a dozen storms on any given day?
I think it’s more like both what am I angriest about and what am I not sick of reading about. As a reader, every single day, all day long, it’s like, “Boy, the president was doing a bad job.” It’s trying to figure out what’s a palatable, bite-sized chunk of this that maybe you can make an argument that is somewhat new.
Because in addition to the fact that everything is horrible, everything is also absurd. But it’s absurd in a monotonous way, which you never would have expected. At a certain point, you’re just like, “Yes, I live inside this nightmare now.” But you still have to figure out a way of making it surprising. Because it should be surprising, every day. And the fact that it’s not is just because our brains are doing their best to get us through it.
Do you feel like there’s stuff you can’t write about for the Post?
We’ll see. Stay tuned.
Going through your new book and seeing all of your columns compiled over the years on, among others, Brett Kavanaugh, Laura Ingraham, and of course, Trump. What’s the hate mail look like?
The worst you could get is when somebody says like “spot on” when you were making what you thought was hopefully so cartoonishly horrible a proposition. I wonder if Jonathan Swift got emails from people—not emails, I guess pigeons from people, being like, “I’m so glad somebody had the courage to say we should have eaten those babies because, man, I was thinking it, and you said it.”
Those are the most depressing ones.
In one column, I wrote, “I’m sick of these kids demanding safe spaces”—where it was clearly just heightened—and a reader was like, “No, we are fully in agreement with it. And nothing should be made safer,” even if we’re talking about children’s physical safety from actual violence.
Recently I did one about how Mitch McConnell was sitting on a throne of skulls, confirming even more judges. And it turns out that sometimes without realizing what you’re doing, you can make Mitch McConnell sound good to people who think that it’s cool to sit on a throne of skulls. One reader wrote me saying, “Oh, he just sounds more badass than ever.” So I’m sorry that to people who love skull thrones that I’ve added to the mythology or the Mitch-thology. That’s a regret.
Do you think conservatives aren’t funny?
Humor has to do with what you think is true about the world. If I thought different things were true about the world, then different things in the world would strike me as absurd. Every joke is sort of an argument where you’re trying to connect a line to what people think is true from something that they may have not made up their mind about.
Because Trump borders on self-parody, does that make it more challenging for you to point out the absurdities of his administration, his policies, and his everyday banter?
I’ve been trying to read War and Peace because I have no household responsibilities and I kept thinking, was Napoleon like this? Every few generations, is there just one guy that everybody who thinks and writes has to spend their entire life just obsessing over? When I think about the number of pages and column inches and just hours that really good, cool, interesting people are spending on this void of a man, it’s wild.
I feel like we’ve already put in the full monkeys-Shakespeare-hours level. Everyone’s still circling and doesn’t know what’s in there. I could spend the rest of my life just writing and writing and writing, and I’d never get to the bottom of it. It’s like this abyss you’re staring into. But also there’s like no echo from it, and you really want there to be an echo.
Is that why Saturday Night Live skits impersonating Trump are not funny?
I have a difficulty separating the fact that Trump was on Saturday Night Live from the fact that he’s being parodied on Saturday Night Live. Up until the very point when he’s president and harming all of these people, there is this TV character who, it feels like, is a safe person to have on—almost—if you’re in a certain zone of protection.
Now, they’re doing his tone, but what’s the joke that they’re making other than things that are ridiculous about him that they’re making fun of? I think it works best when it’s close to being true.
Maybe the way to go into it isn’t to be like, what’s wacky about this man, but how is this impacting us today? What about this is coming out that we can sort of map onto something else? I don’t know. I wish I had a better Unified Trump Theory. I always like to ask people, what’s your Unified Trump Theory?
Is that why The Onion is funny, and The Borowitz Report doesn’t land?
I love The Onion. In these times, people got to get their laughs where they can. Sometimes you just need somebody to do a version of the thing that will delight a Facebook user. And there’s no shame in that. I was trying to say this really nicely. Sometimes my version of “I’m going to try to say in the nicest way I can” turns out to be devastating, and that’s the opposite of what I meant.
Where do you turn when you need a laugh?
Obviously, I keep saying Robert Benchley all the time. Or possibly the wreckage of The Toast, and I do read The Onion because they’re consistently good. Often humor that’s anchored in absurdity or just isn’t anchored in anything at all. I have gotten this real appreciation for P.G. Wodehouse, speaking of more 20th-century detached folks. But I just love him on an individual-sentence level, writing that’s funny. To me, that can be incredibly soothing. Or Airplane! That’s a great film.
Do you have any surprising influences?
Garfield—I really love Garfield. Yeah, that’s gonna be my surprising influence. Old Garfield fat-cat three-packs. I’m fascinated by Jim Davis’s brain.
I notice you use a lot of exclamation marks! And you use them very effectively! And they’re a very hard punctuation mark to use!
Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald said an exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. But what’s wrong with laughing at your own jokes, especially if you’re a columnist writing in, you know, the solitude of your ... sanctorum or something that I could throw in here to sound erudite. Why shouldn’t you laugh at your own joke? If you can’t laugh at your own jokes, who will?
What was it like when the White House included one of your (satirical) columns in their daily report?
It was fun to be real news, however briefly. It is also fun to learn who in my life received the daily 1600 briefing, which I now receive every day just to see what the real news is. And man, things are going so much better than we had any idea they were. So it’s always nice to hear that sort of thing, because you might think that things were not so good, but that would be incorrect. And in fact, we’re just piling up victories right and left. But mostly right. So it’s been nice to learn about those. Although I have not made a second cameo, which I think is cause for relief.
We’re coming to the end of this interview. Have you plugged your book sufficiently?
Oh, yeah, we should. That’s a good thought. When is the book coming out? It’s coming out June 2nd, and I got a box of them this week, but I haven’t taken them out of the container yet because I want to let them mellow.
