Another from Alex Pareene's 'Hack List'.
Andy Borowitz: Not funny
How did the creator of "The Fresh Prince" become America's foremost political satirist and teller of dad jokes?
By Alex Pareene
Andy Borowitz makes dad jokes for self-satisfied liberals. If you think Sarah Palin is stupid and Mitt Romney is rich, Andy Borowitz has some jokes that will decidedly not challenge a single one of your prior assumptions!
For some reason the man who created The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is now Americas foremost political satirist. Except hes not actually a satirist, hes a parodist. As a parodist he falls very short of the standard set by, say, (true American treasure) Weird Al. His milieu is fake news, which is a very crowded field. But Borowitz is a one-man fake news machine, producing with soothing predictability an endless stream of topical jokes and sentences that resemble jokes, for Twitter (Romney: Its time to transform America, and Paul Ryan and I are both Transformers. I think the joke there is that Romney and Ryan are robotic. Or maybe that theyre evil?) and his new home at the New Yorker.
Before he was a microblogging humorist, Borowitz was a very successful television writer and producer. He wrote jokes for some of the worst sitcoms of the 1980s, from Archie Bunkers Place to The Facts of Life. (Before that, of course, he was a Harvard Lampoon editor.) The 80s Sitcom Hack still shines through when he goes for the cheapest possible joke. Like this collection of groan-inducing gags about Jenna Jamesons endorsement of Mitt Romney which was already a joke. Or this [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJXp_IACKC4"]Obama joke possibly the worst Borowitz joke of all time? he shared on CNN in 2008[/ame]: Last night my wife said we cant have sex and I said Yes We Can. Wooooooooof. Take my New York Times Weekender subscription, Internet connection and HuffPo login, please!
Borowitzs biggest success, and the reason he could devote himself full-time to writing a newsletter for his friends that grew into a tiny comedy website that was eventually folded into the New Yorker, was The Fresh Prince, which NBC assigned him to create because he was the only youngish person they could find for its Will Smith project. (It is so, so Hollywood that a 32-year-old white Harvard grad son of a corporate lawyer and art historian from suburban Ohio was selected by a major network to create and produce a comedy vehicle for a young black rapper from Philadelphia.)
*snip*
Andy Borowitz: Not funny - Salon.com
Andy Borowitz: Not funny
How did the creator of "The Fresh Prince" become America's foremost political satirist and teller of dad jokes?
By Alex Pareene
Andy Borowitz makes dad jokes for self-satisfied liberals. If you think Sarah Palin is stupid and Mitt Romney is rich, Andy Borowitz has some jokes that will decidedly not challenge a single one of your prior assumptions!
For some reason the man who created The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is now Americas foremost political satirist. Except hes not actually a satirist, hes a parodist. As a parodist he falls very short of the standard set by, say, (true American treasure) Weird Al. His milieu is fake news, which is a very crowded field. But Borowitz is a one-man fake news machine, producing with soothing predictability an endless stream of topical jokes and sentences that resemble jokes, for Twitter (Romney: Its time to transform America, and Paul Ryan and I are both Transformers. I think the joke there is that Romney and Ryan are robotic. Or maybe that theyre evil?) and his new home at the New Yorker.
Before he was a microblogging humorist, Borowitz was a very successful television writer and producer. He wrote jokes for some of the worst sitcoms of the 1980s, from Archie Bunkers Place to The Facts of Life. (Before that, of course, he was a Harvard Lampoon editor.) The 80s Sitcom Hack still shines through when he goes for the cheapest possible joke. Like this collection of groan-inducing gags about Jenna Jamesons endorsement of Mitt Romney which was already a joke. Or this [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJXp_IACKC4"]Obama joke possibly the worst Borowitz joke of all time? he shared on CNN in 2008[/ame]: Last night my wife said we cant have sex and I said Yes We Can. Wooooooooof. Take my New York Times Weekender subscription, Internet connection and HuffPo login, please!
Borowitzs biggest success, and the reason he could devote himself full-time to writing a newsletter for his friends that grew into a tiny comedy website that was eventually folded into the New Yorker, was The Fresh Prince, which NBC assigned him to create because he was the only youngish person they could find for its Will Smith project. (It is so, so Hollywood that a 32-year-old white Harvard grad son of a corporate lawyer and art historian from suburban Ohio was selected by a major network to create and produce a comedy vehicle for a young black rapper from Philadelphia.)
*snip*
Andy Borowitz: Not funny - Salon.com
