Andy Borowitz, author, comedian, and creator of The New Yorker's “Borowitz Report,” a satirical news column, recaps his New Yorker festival interview with Jane Goodall.
[music]
Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. At The New Yorker Festival this month, there were any number of interview pairings that made total sense and at least one that didn't. Political Reporter Jane Mayer interviewed Attorney General Merrick Garland. That made sense. Museum Director Thelma Golden interviewed artist Kara Walker. That made sense. David Remnick interviewed Jon Stewart. That made sense. How about this one? Satirist Andy Borowitz interviewed primatologist Jane Goodall. Borowitz is known for his fake news headlines that could almost be real like recently, "Trump to skip 2024 campaign and go straight to claiming he won," or "Republicans blast Facebook for endangering democracy. They say that's our job." That was from his column, the Borowitz Report.
Jane Goodall. Well, she's Jane Goodall, the 87-year-old naturalist, and environmentalist known best for saving chimpanzees from extinction and revealing to human primates how closely related we actually are to other primates. Jane Goodall, the most earnest person in the world interviewed by Andy Borowitz. Well, Andy joins us now with a few clips of Jane Goodall and some thoughts of his own, who knows, maybe on Facebook taking the job of endangering democracy away from the GOP. Andy, it's always a treat when you come on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.
Andy Borowitz: Thanks, Brian, my friend, how are you?
Brian: Good, thank you. I could name a dozen science writers or environmentalists who would come right to mind to interview Jane Goodall. Why'd they pick you?
Andy: Well, this is what's great about The New Yorker. The New Yorker Festival came to me and they asked me, "Who do I want to interview this year?" I said, "Science is under attack in our country." You may have noticed that, Brian, from time to time. I said, "Why don't we bring on a scientist so we can celebrate science," and so they came back to me with Jane Goodall. It's like saying, "I'd really like to talk to a basketball player and then they give you LeBron James." We really went sort of to the pinnacle here.
By the way, she wanted me to call her Jane, so I'm not being presumptuous here.
I don't know whether Jane vetted me. I don't know whether her people took a good look at my resume or not, but it was a true honor. To tell you the truth, she is not that earnest. She's got a great sense of humor as we'll see in the interview. I think the interview is going to play-- a lot of it's going to play on the New Yorker Radio Hour this weekend. She has a great sense of humor and I actually was pretty earnest because I care about, well, earnest things like saving the planet, and Jane's an expert when it comes to stuff like that.
Brian: I'll be curious to see if the New Yorker Radio Hour which airs here on the weekends will choose any of the same clips that I did for this. Of course, these are going to be short. I'm going to play two clips of Jane Goodall from your interview in which he makes very interesting distinctions about words that she uses. The first one is quite short, under 30 seconds, on why she prefers to think of herself as a naturalist more than a scientist.
Jane: Well, the difference to me is that science is very factual-oriented and that's good. I'm not saying there's anything against that, but what's missing in so many ethological scientists is the sense of wonder and awe and not wanting everything to be explained because some things never can be explained. I'm pretty sure about that.
Brian: That's interesting. Naturalist conveys more of a sense of wonder about the world and acknowledges that some things can't be explained. Here's another language distinction she made. This runs about a minute and a half. Jane's new book is called The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times in which she gives four main reasons that she thinks there is hope for humanity and for the planet. She says one of them is human intellect and makes a point of calling it intellect rather than intelligence.
Jane: Well, the reason I use intellect rather than intelligence. The thing that makes us more different from chimps and everything else is the explosive development of our intellect. Animals are way, way, way more intelligent than people used to think, but we've designed a rocket that went up to Mars and took photos. It's still there. How bizarre that this most intellectual creature is destroying its only home, but now, scientists are beginning to come up with all sorts of innovative technology to help heal some of the harm that we've inflicted like moving towards renewable energy as one example. People in their individual lives are beginning to think about how you behave and what you buy and did it harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals? Is it cheap because of unfair wages or forced labor? If so, don't buy it. We're really beginning to use our brains to leave lighter ecological footprints.
Brian: Jane Goodall from our interview this month with the New Yorker's, Andy Borowitz, at The New Yorker Festival. Andy is our guest. I was wondering for you as a writer, Andy, if those two distinctions jumped out at you like they jumped out at me. She prefers naturalist to scientists and human intellect to human intelligence.
Andy: Well, they did. I think one really interesting thing about Jane Goodall and why I think she considers herself a naturalist is when she was doing all that groundbreaking research in Tanzania in the '60s. She did not even have a college degree. She had gone to secretarial school because her family didn't have enough money to send her to college. One of the reasons Louis Leakey who was her mentor chose her for this research was because he didn't think she would have that bias that you get at the academy.
She wouldn't have all these preconceived notions and he thought that she had tremendous patience. He believed women were more patient than men, I tend to agree with that, and that she also had tremendous empathy and so she would be able to look at the chimps' behavior in a non-academic, non-scientific, if you will, way. She got into trouble when she went back to get her PhD. She did all this amazing research. She went back to Cambridge to get her PhD, and all the fine things that she had found, the people, the academics had tremendous problems with because she named the chimps and that was considered too emotional, too anthropomorphic.
She came to all of these conclusions that were dead on 100% right, but they didn't agree with the "scientific findings." She's very pro-science, obviously, as am I, but I think that she leaves that crack of the door open to say, "I don't know. I don't know why this is the case. I don't know why the chimps did this. I'm guessing." There's a tremendous amount of intellectual humility behind that and intellectual humility is what leads us to discover new things.
Brian: Nicely put. You, by the way, were very well behaved with Jane. I listened to the whole thing and you didn't try to corral her into playing along with your fake news stories at all. Were you tempted to try that?
Andy: No. She's so much my hero. I would have just looked like the biggest jerk in the world [chuckles] if I had done any of that stuff. Having said that, since you've heard the whole interview, it was far from a deadly serious interview. It had its lighter moments. We discussed among other things Jane's pension for whiskey. She likes whiskey. Also at the end, I don't want to brag, but she actually invited me to have a whiskey with her the next time she's in the United States. If you think I'm going to turn down whiskey with Jane Goodall, you've got [chuckles] nothing coming.
Brian: Not only that, but while you were very sincere and very respectable, at least for you, the only person who referred to sex in the whole conversation was Jane Goodall, not you. It was when you asked her innocently to talk about the primate species, bonobos, and she answered like this.
Jane: I'm very glad Leakey didn't choose bonobos for me to study because the females of permanently sexually receptive and they have big pink swellings on their backside, and The Geographic would never at that time [inaudible 00:09:26] photograph. There's no question. One of the early pictures that you go took came back, and it was a beautiful picture of four males sitting. They were all a bit excited, so they all had penile erections. The Graphic came back with a circle around each one saying, "Blend into
fur.''
[laughter]
Brian: Blend into fur. Give it a gauzy obscuring and so maybe the media world has changed. so much from those days like a half-century ago that back then they wouldn't even include a picture of a bonobo for that reason in National Geographic. Today they'd probably put it on the cover of some magazine or another, do you think?
Andy: Well, first of all, a couple of things about that clip. You're right in saying that Jane Goodall, not Andy Borowitz brought up the topic of sex. She was the one who dragged the conversation into the gutter. I want to make that very clear. Secondly, I didn't want to drill down in this one detail, but when she was discussing the male chimps being aroused, she referred to their "penile erections" really verge and very close to porn here for the New Yorker Festival. I was going to ask her, is there another kind of erection? That was a very specific terminology that I wasn't necessarily sure was required but I didn't want to ask. I was almost afraid to ask. Maybe there were other kinds of erections that Jane Goodall has witnessed in the wild that I don't need to know about. I don't know.
Brian: I guess. Andy, before you go, I couldn't help but notice the latest Borowitz report headline 'Trump to skip 2024 campaign and go right to claiming he won'. I get it, Andy, why would anybody go to the trouble of campaigning if they already know there's only one outcome they'll accept, right?
Andy: That's right. He's not a young man at this point. There's a lot of wear and tear when you go from huge crowd to huge crowd all across the country. Since the outcome is already clear, he has won the 2024 election in his mind. It seems so much more efficient to just go right to claiming that, to claiming that it was stolen. I think the only problem with that headline as a satirical headline is that it's 100% true, [laughs] but other than that, it's fine. It'll stand.
Brian: Other than that, it's fake. Andy Borowitz, which does the Borowitz Report. Satire, not the news in the New Yorker and did a great interview with Jane Goodall at the New Yorker Festival, which I just learned from Andy will be excerpted on the New Yorker Radio Hour here on the station this weekend. Andy, thanks for sharing this with us.
Andy: Thanks so much, Brian.
Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.