Photo by Andrew Schwartz

After four years as editor in chief of The Onion, comedian Joe Randazzo is leaving the paper, and America’s self-proclaimed “finest news source” is relocating its offices from New York to Chicago. City & State editor Morgan Pehme talks with Randazzo about his tenure at the helm of the popular satiric publication and asks him if there’s anything funny about Andrew Cuomo.

City & State: What’s so funny about politics?

Joe Randazzo: You have a high concentration of egotistical people who oftentimes put their worst qualities forward to get noticed and to be recognized, and this lack of compassion, humanism and altruism often leads to success in politics. These are the worst qualities of humankind that people who are being put forth to represent all of humankind are embodying, so that inherently is a tragically hilarious juxtaposition.

CS: How seriously does The Onion take itself?

JR: I think it’s understood that there’s this bedrock responsibility to speak truth to power, to call out bullsh-t when The Onion sees it or hears it, and to always try to fall on the right side of issues, to never be against the victim—and not to try to maintain objectivity but to keep any target open, so Democrats are just as open to ridicule as Republicans. But in order to get to the good jokes that make The Onion successful, all the writers have to do is make each other laugh. I think a responsibility to the broader social conversation is genetically encoded in The Onion as an institution and that rubs off on the writers, but on a daily basis Onion writers aren’t thinking about their responsibility or taking themselves very seriously. It just needs to be funny jokes.

CS: At The Onion, are you a journalist first or a comedian?

JR: I come from a little bit of a journalism background. I majored in journalism at Emerson and I worked for NPR, but I’m definitely a comedian first.

CS: Earlier this year, Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana mistakenly thought a story in The Onion about a planned “AbortionPlex” was genuine. On other occasions The New York Times and Fox News have reported on your articles as fact. How blurry is the line between real news and fake news in the current media environment?

JR: That one was really wonderful, because the whole point of the AbortionPlex story itself was to try to give as much credence to what we imagined every right-wing nut job’s worst nightmare of Planned Parenthood could be and to explore that and give it The Onion treatment, which is to present it in a very dry, authoritative way. That’s our formula; that’s the lens through which we observe the world—that’s where 90% of our comedy comes from—so when we do it really well, sometimes people who aren’t familiar with us take it seriously. I think it does to a degree speak to—especially during the Bush Administration and the rise of FOX News, not that Rupert Murdoch is an evil person, per se—this sort of reinventing news as entertainment that that has really taken hold in American culture.

I think in [Rep. Fleming’s] case, he’s a pandering guy who’s not that intelligent, who thought that something obscenely ridiculous like the AbortionPlex could ever possibly be real. But actually, one of the things that lent it some credence was that somebody went and created an actual Yelp site for the AbortionPlex—we didn’t solicit this, they just did this of their own accord, organically—and hundreds of people who were in on the joke started giving it thumbs up or thumbs down and writing reviews like “It was great! My husband and I are going to go there every year for our anniversary” and stuff like that, which sort of gave texture to this world we created that we never could have done on our own. I think that story, paired with that kind of real-world response to it, painted this picture that for some people made it much easier to believe that it was real, even though the story itself was ridiculous. I mean, it’s a $7 billion AbortionPlex or something like that, where they’re killing, like, 1500 babies a minute. There’s waterslides, and you can have a martini while you wait. It’s like there’s no way that would ever be real, even from Planned Parenthood. It’s delightful when people take that stuff seriously.

CS: Does constantly mocking hypocrisy and ineptitude in government make you hopelessly cynical about the state of our country?

JR: I think a lot of comedians are cynical. I’m generalizing, but comedians tend to be fairly sensitive people who have to kind of harden their souls to the fact that they’re going to get hurt, and that everybody’s going to get hurt, and that people are imperfect and that, you know, ultimately we’re all going to die. I think that’s actually the background of every comedian’s mind. So, I think there’s a side to that sensitivity that hopes for good, that wants to be optimistic, that wants to be idealistic, but that’s a vulnerable place to be, and rather than going out and trying to collect names for Children’s International, comedians write nasty jokes about Rush Limbaugh. Personally, I wouldn’t say that I’m cynical, but I’m not an activist.

I think that our country, if we continue on this path which is consumed with the endless obsession with consumption—that’s physically unsustainable, spiritually unsustainable, and culturally unsustainable. Politics is just a reflection of that, trying to keep order out of all these different types and groups of people, who are all basically just trying to get by in a material world—I think Madonna said that at some point. So I don’t actual think I’m cynical, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope for, like, big change. For one thing, we’ll probably have to wipe out, like, three quarters of the population maybe before anything good can happen, and that’s okay, I’m comfortable with that. I’m just enjoying my life while I can before the big purge comes.

CS: As a comedic journalist, when scandals like the ones that brought down Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer hit the papers, do you just think to yourself, Thank you!?

JR: Something like Eliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner is a little more in the purview, from The Onion point of view, of late-night talk shows, like one-liners and zingers. The Onion tends not to really comment on those types of little blips, and when we do it tends to be more of a comment on the media’s take on something. We try to write stories that can be evergreen, that you can read in 10 years and they would still make some sense. We try to look at it with more than a 24-hour news cycle mentality. When Anthony Weiners come up I think we actually say, “Sh-t!” because we have to either figure out a joke that nobody else has done, or we won’t be able to cover it at all.

CS: The Onion hasn’t really run a satiric article featuring Andrew Cuomo since his days as HUD Secretary. Is there just nothing funny about Cuomo to write about?

JR: I don’t think there is. He’s boring, right? That’s his whole thing?

CS: In 2009 The Onion was awarded a Peabody, and last year you actively campaigned for a Pulitzer. Does The Onion really deserve journalism’s highest award or was that just a shameless publicity stunt?

JR: I think that we would all actually really like to win a Pulitzer—and now that I’m leaving in two days, I think I can say that The Onion absolutely does deserve a Pulitzer. In terms of commentary I don’t think there’s anyone who has consistently done a better job with sort of more integrity that The Onion has. The Onion also does lots of stupid, horrible jokes that have no business being published, but I think there isn’t any other organization that has for 20 years observed the American condition as consistently as The Onion has. It’s been amazing to be able to work for them for six years. The Pulitzer campaign was definitely tongue-in-cheek. It was meant to be sort of a comment on awarding prizes for journalism, which is kind of a weird thing. In many ways, even though you are talking about things that are supposed to be good for the community, it can get wrapped up in just as much vanity as the Academy Awards can. So we thought it would be funny, instead of pretending we don’t care about prizes like many news outlets do, just shamelessly going for one and saying we will actually just buy one from you, if you allow us to do it.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

Once upon a time, a little red herring met the emperor’s new clothes. The red herring, of course, is the assertion by the Republican campaign that the Democrats are (gasp!) questioning the honor of vice presidential would-be Sarah Palin. It’s nonsense, of course. In fact, when an NPR host asked a Republican partisan selling this line to name a single Democrat who was sullying Palin’s honor (by suggesting her daughter’s pregnancy was somehow immoral) the Republican operative couldn’t, and he was reduced to mumbling something about “Democratic surrogates.” So the little red herring is a lie, the same kind of lie that the Republican administration tried to sell this country in order to justify a war based on “weapons of mass destruction” (there weren’t any) and Saddam Hussein somehow being behind Al Qaeda and, by extension, the destruction of the World Trade Center.
The lying doesn’t stop there. The emperor’s new clothes syndrome is the repeated assertion that John McCain and George W. Bush are different. They are not. McCain argues that the economy is fine and the war in Iraq is a good one. Sound familiar? In order to win this election they have to convince the voters that they are the agents of change and that they are running against Bush and the Washington crowd. They must argue that McCain will save the earth. He is the guy who will make this a green country. Who will help him do this? Palin, the Alaskan who wants more drilling, despoiling her own state. Forget about McCain, one of the ultimate Washington insiders who, as part of a gang of senators known as “The Keating Five,” was involved up in his neck in a massive savings and loan scandal.
The Republicans know that if they are seen as, well, Republicans, they can’t win. So they are in the process of reinventing themselves as a new political party known as “The Mavericks.” Despite the fact that McCain is as inside-the-beltway as you can get, he and his party tell the big lie, and they tell it over and over again. I suppose we Americans are gullible enough to buy it. Either that or we’re all suffering a sort of collective memory loss. So despite the fact that McCain and Bush are on the same page, the big lie is that they are not. Just like the crowd who watched the naked emperor ride by, the American people are watching McCain suggest that he is not George Bush.
Palin, the red herring, is a candidate in search of an enemy who called her names when none did. It’s a campaign based on fiction. Anyone who thinks this trickery won’t work is full of baloney. Below the surface, of course, is unabashed racism. There are people in this country who will not vote for a person of color. They might say they’re not racist, but in the sanctity of the voting booth, we all know what they’ll do.
If you watched the Republican convention, you heard an awful lot of rhetoric that left the have-nots out of the equation. The subliminal theme of the convention was “It’s us against them.” The “them,” as Michael Harrington once wrote, is “The other America”-those without health insurance, those living in poverty and those who are most often victimized by criminals. When Palin speaks about Barack Obama having been a “community organizer,” she is speaking in code. In elections gone by, “community organizer” would have been “Communist” or “Red” or “Liberal.”
If people of color realize that they should vote in huge numbers, and if the reform-minded kids who started the grassroots Obama movement stay with it, Obama has a chance. If people hide, curse and stamp their feet, McCain will be our next president. The little red herring and the emperor’s new clothes will have become a very successful fairy tale.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.