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.

By Alan S. Chartock

Everyone wants to know whether Carl Paladino can really be elected Governor. The answer is yes, he can. That is astounding to everyone who thinks he is a mad, crazy, Tea Party kind of guy—a rip-off artist who has made tons from government programs while preaching the gospel of fiscal conservatism. You can pick and choose among all the reasons not to vote for the guy, but recent polls show that Paladino is moving up. How can that be when the newspapers are doing one exposé or editorial after another about him? Of course, newspapers are not well thought of. We have seen several polls indicating that journalists enjoy widespread contempt.

How is it that when Andrew Cuomo is doing the right thing by not getting down in the mud with the guy, Paladino’s numbers keep going up? The respected Marist Poll shows him 15 points behind among likely voters.

Things get stranger and stranger. I have a friend who makes his living selling legal guns. He tells me that he is voting for Andrew Cuomo. He says that the other guy is just too crazy. That would fly in the face of the rising poll numbers for Paladino. The secret, of course, is that the middle-class voter sees the “system” as conspiring against them. All they know is that no matter who is in power, they are the ones getting screwed. Their taxes are going up, their schools are characterized as not working, too many of their politicians are on the take and the in-groups in the legislature are more concerned about preserving their status than about helping the people. What’s more, voters are feeling more and more that they are being “played.” They get two choices, Republicans or Democrats, and no matter who is in office, things seem to stay the same.

People want to know why media magnate Rupert Murdoch, a fiscal conservative, is backing Andrew Cuomo and has been since the Attorney General got into the race. They are genuinely puzzled about the fact that Murdoch is supporting the son of Mario when he did more than anyone else to get Mario out of office in 1994. A few potential answers to the puzzle are that Andrew has been moving seriously to the right; Murdoch’s kids seem to have far more social conscience than he does; and Cuomo senior saved the New York Post when he supported giving Post owner Rupert a waiver on the prohibition against owning both a newspaper and a television station in the same market.

The better answer is that we have no idea. It could just be, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “…secret agreements secretly arrived at” (implicitly or explicitly). That’s why it was no surprise that one of Murdoch’s top political guys, Frederic U. Dicker, got in the face of Paladino and started the “War of Two Mutts” that was seen on TV and heard around the world on virtually every radio station. Dicker has done this kind of gonzo journalism again and again and it always gets the desired results. But let’s just remember who is pressing the Dicker buttons.

Many journalists know that the in-your-face Dicker performance was unprofessional but they supported him anyway, so threatening is Paladino, the rogue politician. So Joe Shmoe, living in Levittown and madder than hell about everything, may just want to send a message. Joe’s, “Get off my back. Get away from me. Go away!” may be just like Paladino’s, “I’m madder than hell and you should be, too!” message. It will not be the first time in history that someone has fallen for the off-the-wall politico message. When people get angry enough they just say, “Nothing can be worse than this.”

Andrew is between a rock and a hard place. If he comes out and fights Paladino, he is the old “Bully Boy” Andrew, and if he takes the reasonable path and doesn’t fight, he is disdained for not being combative enough. As of now, he seems to be holding his fire but if the polls continue to narrow, Andrew may have to come out and fight. That would mean debating, which is something he clearly does not want to do because it gives the man the Daily News calls “Crazy Carl” an even bigger platform. These are very dangerous times. The voters are in a state of near rebellion against what they think is a rigged system and that’s why Paladino could win. It all depends on just how angry and fed up they are.

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