WHAT ABOUT ANDY BOROWITZ?

Has anybody stopped to consider Andy Borowitz’s feelings?

For decades, Borowitz has operated on the assumption that reality would remain predictable enough for him to invent something more absurd. It was a stable arrangement: politicians would do the usual blend of corruption and hypocrisy, and Borowitz would take it two notches higher for comedic effect. He could work at a comfortable pace, confident that the news cycle would not overtake him.

That arrangement is gone. In 2025, the news isn’t competing with him — it’s replacing him. The President is on the White House roof, gesturing like a child playing “spaceship” while talking about nuclear missiles. Governors are dispatching state police to hunt down missing lawmakers across multiple time zones. Elon Musk has started a political party and named it “America” with no platform beyond “America.” None of these stories require embellishment. All of them are absurd.

People who don’t even know Borowitz say he’s considering retirement, though they speak in hushed tones, as if to spare him the indignity of admitting it. They describe him staring at headlines in silence, coffee cooling on the table, as though he’s trying to will them into fiction. One colleague says he printed out a Reuters alert about the Department of Labor Statistics firing and just wrote “too much” in the margin. It’s unclear whether he meant “too much to process” or “too much competition.”

The uncomfortable truth is that Borowitz’s plight mirrors that of satire itself. The field depends on a gap between reality and absurdity. In 2025, that gap has closed. We have reached a point where the day’s events are indistinguishable from parody, except parody has editors and deadlines, and reality does not.

So, what about Andy Borowitz? Maybe he’ll adapt. Maybe he’ll pivot to writing about normal things — weather, gardening, the occasional celebrity scandal — in hopes of finding a corner of the world still safe for exaggeration. Or maybe he’ll do what satire itself is quietly preparing to do: slip out the back door during the next news cycle, leaving only a short note that reads, “You don’t need me anymore. You’ve got the truth.”

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