Andy Borowitz (born January 4, 1958)[1] is an American writer, comedian, satirist, and actor. Borowitz is a New York Times-bestselling author who won the first National Press Club award for humor. He is known for creating the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the satirical column The Borowitz Report.
After graduating from Harvard, Borowitz moved to Los Angeles to work for producer Bud Yorkin at Tandem Productions, the company Yorkin co-founded with producer Norman Lear. From 1982 through 1983, he wrote for the television series Square Pegs, starring Sarah Jessica Parker. From 1983 through 1984, he wrote for the television series The Facts of Life. He wrote for various television series through the 1980s.
During his marriage to writer and producer Susan Borowitz (1982–2005), the two co-created The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,[6] which ran for six seasons on NBC and launched the acting career of Will Smith.[7] The series won NAACP's Image Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993.[8]
In the late 1990s, Borowitz began e-mailing humorous news parodies to friends. In 2001, he founded The Borowitz Report, a site that posts one 250-word news satire every weekday. The site led to greater fame and widespread attention for Borowitz as a political satirist. The Wall Street Journal devoted a page-one story to him and his site in 2003 and readership ultimately grew to the millions. In 2005, the newspaper syndicator Creators Syndicate began syndicating The Borowitz Report to dozens of major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. It is also one of the longest-running features at the Newsweek website. He has served as a commentator on the National Public Radio programs Weekend Edition Sunday and Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!, the latter on November 12, 2006. Borowitz is also a regular contributor to humor newspaper Funny Times.
In 2007, he started blogging for the Huffington Post. His posts were featured on the home page of the blog and quickly became one of its most popular features. His popularity surged during the 2008 campaign, leading The Daily Beast to call him "America's satire king".[9]
In 2009, The Borowitz Report began a Twitter feed, which was voted the number-one Twitter account in the world in a Time magazine poll in 2011. Eventually, he abandoned the feed.[10]
On July 18, 2012, Borowitz announced that The New Yorker had acquired the Borowitz Report website, the first time that the magazine had ever made such an acquisition. In its first 24 hours as a New Yorker feature, The Borowitz Report garnered the most page views on the entire New Yorker website.[citation needed]
In 2010, Borowitz appeared on the PBS show Need to Know. Tom Shales, television critic for The Washington Post, singled out Borowitz for praise, calling him "one of the wittiest Web wags".[11]
Stand-up comedy
Borowitz's success as a television performer led to his becoming a strong draw as a stand-up comedian, and he started headlining at major comedy clubs across the country, including Carolines on Broadway, where he hosts a monthly show called Next Week's News. Other major comedians who have appeared with him in that show include Amy Sedaris and Susie Essman.
He continued to tour the country performing stand-up, including a performance at the University of California, Santa Barbara in April 2008. The university newspaper, Daily Nexus, reported that Borowitz played to a packed house and had the audience "erupting with laughter".[13]
Comedian Mike Birbiglia praised Borowitz in a May 2009 profile in Harvard Magazine: "Andy just picked up stand-up comedy as a hobby, and he's as good at it as anybody."[14]
On November 28, 2010, CBS News Sunday Morning aired a retrospective of his career as a comedian and writer, calling him "one of the funniest people in America".[15]
On June 28, 2011, he performed at New York City's Central Park Summerstage and drew a crowd estimated at 5,000, setting a new record for turnout at a Summerstage spoken-word event.
The New Yorker
In 1998, Borowitz began contributing humor to The New Yorker magazine. He quickly became one of the magazine's most prolific humor contributors, writing dozens of essays including "Emily Dickinson, Jerk of Amherst",[16] selected as one of the funniest humor pieces in the magazine's history and included in The New Yorker's humor collection Fierce Pajamas. Two more humor pieces of his appeared in the magazine's 2008 collection Disquiet, Please! He has also performed at The New Yorker Festival's humor revues at The Town Hall in New York City with such other New Yorker contributors as Woody Allen, Steve Martin, and Calvin Trillin. Additionally, he has joined The New Yorker College Tour, where he has performed with improv group The Second City and David Sedaris.
In addition to writing for The New Yorker, Borowitz has written for many other magazines, including Vanity Fair and The Believer, and was a primary contributor to the cult magazine Army Man.
In 2011, Library of America chose Borowitz to edit an anthology of American humor, The 50 Funniest American Writers. Encompassing American humor from Mark Twain to The Onion, the book was set to be released on October 13, 2011. It became a best seller on the day of its publication, reaching number eight on Amazon.com and becoming the number-one humor book in the United States. It also became the first book in the 32-year history of the Library of America to become a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Both Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com named it a Best Book of 2011, and Amazon.com named it the number-one Entertainment Book of the Year. In a feature about the book, The Washington Post noted its popular success, calling Borowitz "America's finest fake-news creator and sharpest political satirist".[17]
An Unexpected Twist
In 2012, Borowitz wrote his first autobiographical work, An Unexpected Twist, an Amazon Kindle single. The essay recounts Borowitz's near-death experience in 2008 while undergoing emergency abdominal surgery in New York City. A mixture of dark comedy, hospital drama and love story, the book became a bestseller on its first day of release, placing number one on Amazon's Kindle Single chart. It became the first nonfiction Kindle Single to make The Wall Street Journal bestseller list, debuting at number six.[18]
In his book review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote, "Andy Borowitz is the funniest human on Twitter, and that's not mean praise. His first original e-book—the current best-selling Single—is a seriocomic memoir called An Unexpected Twist, about a blockage in his colon that nearly killed him. This funny book has a sneaky emotional gravity. As the time of his illness, he'd been married only a few months, and his small book becomes a rather large love story."[19]
In his review of the book, journalist Seth Mnookin wrote, "Borowitz has become one of the most lauded satirists in the country—think of him as a literary Jon Stewart. His name graces the cover of one of the most successful Library of America volumes ever (The 50 Funniest American Writers* (*According to Andy Borowitz)). He was voted by Time magazine readers as having the #1 Twitter feed in the world. He even hosted the National Book Awards—twice… It's no surprise that Borowitz is able to mine his situation for humor. What makes An Unexpected Twist even more satisfying is his ability to highlight some of the surreal and infuriating aspects of modern American medical care without hitting the reader over the head with them."[20]
On June 25, 2012, Amazon named An Unexpected Twist the Best Kindle Single of 2012.
In October 2012, he became the host of the BBC comedy series News Quiz USA. The hit comedy series has millions of listeners on BBC Radio 4 in the U.K. and is broadcast on the public radio station WNYC in New York.
Personal life
He was married to Susan Borowitz, the co-creator of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. After their divorce he married Olivia Gentile,[21] the author of Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds. He has three children and lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.[22]
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