The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jon Stewart’s Children

Episode Date: December 29, 2017

In the years after September 11th, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz; Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show”; Bassem Youssef, and the founders of Reductress. Plus, cartoonists Emily Flake and Drew Dernavich try out an escape room, along with the Radio Hour’s Sara Nics. Originally aired on April 7, 2017.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Oh, my God. We're not going to get through this. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Andy Borowitz. On today's show, understanding the Trump administration by revisiting an 1881 short story by Guy de Mopasson.

Also, a review of Brooklyn's controversial table-to-farm restaurant. And the creator of Hamilton unveils his much-awaited new musical about another Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. Andy Borowitz, on the nose as always, and very hurtful, Andy. I think I'm not going to recover. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I actually think some of those segments would work great. The Gita Mopassel thing, you put Adam Gopnik into that and you've got a home ride. I think you do. I'm David Remnick, and today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, what we're really going to do is talk with some of the leading political satirists working today. So I wanted to start close to home with Andy, who contributes the Borowitz report to New Yorker.com. I could probably just read his headlines for the next half an hour and we'd be pretty happy. But I spoke with Andy Borowitz this past spring and the news cycle was already keeping him pretty busy.

Let me ask you this. What's been your favorite moment so far in the Trump administration? Oh, gosh. I think that learning that Frederick Douglass was still alive made me very happy. I think that the way he kicked off Black History Month with Ben Carson. He's doing a great job. His black friend. And yes, and that's one of the real tricky things for satirous,

and this is so hard to improve on the original when he said, you know, Frederick Douglass, he's been doing a great job. He's been recognized more and more, I notice. And he said it with so much confidence, so much. For a moment there, I thought maybe Frederick Douglass is alive. And it was maybe very happy. And doing a great job. And from a comedy point of view, who's your favorite member of the cabinet?

Well, that's tricky. You know, people like Ben Carson and the forgotten Rick Perry, who's in there somewhere. the Department of Energy Secretary, they seem like obvious candidates, except that the two of them are barely sentient, so they don't give you very much. And I actually, my favorite, who I think is still a little bit under the radar, is Betsy DeVos. Why? Well, I think in comedy, one thing that really makes a funny comedy character is sheer obliviousness. And she seems to have no sense just how out of her depths she is. I mean, she's living on the Amway fortune. So, like, her fortune is

partially based on a Ponzi scheme to begin with. But she, like so many of the billionaires in the cabinet, really seems to believe she's qualified. It's really like she looks at her bank account, and she thinks that that equals experience and expertise. She, I think, typifies that the most, that she has identified as the number one problem in our schools today, grizzly bears who are roaming the halls and need to be shot. Now, I don't know if all our listeners know this, but I think now a couple of times in recent months, the Boris report has been taken seriously and literally, not just here, but abroad. This has been a problem.

We, and you know this better than anybody. And we now label it's satire. We have labeled it 15 times. I think after every sentence, we say just kidding and bold. And yet, nevertheless, what happens? Well, we did a story. It was after. What we.

Oh, you're already distancing yourself. I did a story after Trump first alleged that, oh, we did. Obama had been listening to him. I did a story about Trump ordering all the phones in the White House covered in tinfoil. And I guess this was a convincing story, at least in China, because the official Chinese news agency picked this up. And the story involved Trump in his bathrobe, roaming the halls, ordering people like Kellyanne Conway to go out to the store and buy tinfoil. I really didn't think that this was one of the many stories I've written that were sort of on the border of reality. This one I thought was so way off in Tatters,

this is, again, I think, a challenge of writing about Trump and probably why it's best to write about other people like Betsy DeVos, because anything you write about Trump just seems credible immediately because of who he is and what he does. You know, our colleague Malcolm Gladwell said recently in an episode of his podcast, revisionist history, that American satire kind of falls short. It's a little too polite to subject, it doesn't go for the jugular. That was his take anyway. Does that ring true for you? You know, I think the British have like a different edge. I think the British are more scathing and brutal. And I think what sometimes we call satire in America, I hate to get into

labels, but sometimes it's more burlesque. A really brilliant example of this would be like Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump. It's more like a burlesque treatment where, and he said, Alec has said, in an interview, it's like, I'm not really saying anything satirical about him, I'm really just saying what he does, and I'm sort of amping it up a little bit. I mean, the one thing I've been thinking is that once the American people made the decision that a game show host should have nuclear weapons, that was really kind of the end of satire. Like, you can't really go past that. That's good.

All right. Are we done? You can read the Borowitz Report by Andy Borowitz at New Yorker.com pretty much constantly. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. When you talk about contemporary political satire in America, the discussion has to revolve first around John Stewart. In the years after September 11th, the Bush years, people began to talk about Stewart's daily show as a primary source of information, even if John Stewart himself resisted that role. For better or worse, satirist was suddenly a well-respected profession. Now Stewart's descendants are all over television in the web.

His successor on The Daily Show was Trevor Noah. Noah was a contributor to the show with an unusual background by American television standards. He was from South Africa, a mixed-race child born in the late years of the apartheid era. And eventually, he became a popular comedian there. I grew up in a world where I had to, and we as people, had to obscure what we were really thinking or feeling for fear of retribution. You know, and this is the story of many black people all over the world. One of the greatest examples is Capoeira, you know, martial arts that was born from slaves who could not practice in the view of the slave master, so they had to disguise it as a dance.

That's essentially what many black people did for a long time in South Africa was no different. My family and I, we had to learn how to say what we wanted to say without saying it in a way that would get us into immediate trouble, you know. and that's the difference in my comedy is I don't come from a world where hitting something head on is always the best solution. Sometimes it's the roundabout journey that you take that gets you to your end goal.

So Trevor, as somebody who's coming from outside the United States, you came here and you took one look at Donald Trump and you said, that guy is going to win. You practically predicted it. What gave you the ability to see that? What were you seeing in him? I saw someone who had been successful all over the world. You know, one thing I saw in Donald Trump was charisma.

I saw, and I still see, someone who possesses many of the skills that a good comedian possesses. Like what? He knows how to read an audience, feels whether his message is connecting, tweaks the material to suit the crowd, and is very good at working a bit to get it to the place where it's, It crushes in every single arena in space. And that's what I watched Donald Trump do. I was watch every single time Donald Trump got on TV. I went, man, this guy is good.

And I remember people were like, oh, Jeff Bush, he's probably going to be the nominee. I said, but why? I said, well, he's a Bush and his policies. I said, look. That stuff was lost on. I was like, let me just, just watching these people on stage, that man is fantastically entertaining. And his message is clear, which was more important to me. I knew what Donald Trump's policies were from the very beginning.

And politicians, especially in America, have gotten so good at being obscure with the way they use their language. Obscure talk about globalization and tariffs and import duties and tax inversion. And this guy just says, build a wall. Just build a wall. And everyone goes, I get it. Do you like building a wall? Do you not like it? That's a simple policy to understand.

And I watched him. and he reminded me of people back home, not just in Africa, not just on the continent, but in the regions that I've done stand-up in and I went, this guy's got something. You did an amazing segment on the show where you compare Trump to a series of African strongmen and were it not so horrifying,

it would be unabashedly funny. What I'm trying to say is Donald Trump is presidential. He just happens to be running on the wrong continent. In face, in fact, once you really, realize that Trump is basically the perfect African president. You start to notice the similarities everywhere, like the level of self-regard. I say not in a braggadocious way. I've made billions and billions of dollars.

I made a tremendous amount of money. I'm really rich. I have a great temperament. They love me anyway. I don't have to do this. I've done an amazing job. I was born with a certain intellect. God helped me by giving me a certain brain. I bet that's the one time that God's like, I don't need the praise.

It's cool. That's you. That's you. I'm cool. Now, is that extraordinary level of bragging presidential? Well, let's ask a man who actually was president. Idi Amin, former president and best president of Uganda. The people likes me very much. I am very popular. They am very powerful. I am the one who has got the money. I have got a very good brain.

Now, I'm guessing that maybe John Stewart would not have the same frame of reference to call that up. And he may not have thought he could get away with it. Oh, that's interesting. In some way. That's interesting. That it might have been a Twitter storm of the kind that we're so familiar with. Is that the kind of frame of reference that's just there for you?

Yes. That was born of a conversation we had at the show. People were losing their minds over Donald Trump, and they said he's not presidential. He's madness. We've never seen anything like this. And they said to me, surely Trevor, you're. You are just, your mind must be blown. And I said, no, he's, I've seen this so many times.

Because they thought the only African leader you had seen was Nelson Mandela. Exactly. A lot of people, and I got that. And I said, this is common rhetoric. The best, the greatest, the most tremendous. The best brain. Exactly. Yeah.

And I didn't even think it would be that spot on. I mean, what are the chances, idiot? I mean, literally saying, I have the best brain. And Donald Trump going, I have the best brain. What are the chances? Like, that's how, I mean, Robert Mugabe for years has been running around saying so much winning, so much, there will be so much winning. And that's why he was so familiar to me. What role does your show play in this democratic universe?

Wow, I've always questioned that. You know, when it comes to satire as a whole, you go, does it help? because in some way it brings attention to what's happening or does it hinder because it gives people the illusion that something is being done. I think it's a combination of both. I also think sometimes the effects may not be seen. You think it can hinder?

Definitely. How? Sometimes people think because they've laughed at an issue or because they've mocked it. They've conquered it. They've conquered it. And that's not true. You know, growing up in South Africa,

that was a thing my mom and I used to do and my grandfather, we would mock the apartheid government, but we'd still march. We'd mock the apartheid government, but we still went out and voted. So the mockery and the satire was almost a replenishment of who we were as people. It galvanized our intention, but our intention was still met with action. Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. On today's New Yorker Radio Hour, we're taking a look at the state of satire in America and abroad. In a minute, we'll hear how an Egyptian satirist created his version of a John Stewart-like show

and how that landed him in exile. Stick around. I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. We talked a couple of minutes ago about the impact of John Stewart's daily show on American satire and society. But Stewart also inspired entertainers around the world to go hard on politics, sometimes in countries a lot less tolerant than ours. Basim Yusuf actually wasn't even an entertainer at all. He was a heart surgeon in Cairo.

But he was a fan of stewards and he studied what made the Daily Show work. And after the Mubarak regime fell in the Arab Spring, Yusuf started his own satirical show called Al-Bernameg, which translates simply as the show. And it was a huge success around the Middle East. Viewers loved it, but the ruling class is not so much. In its third season, Albemeg was cancelled

under heavy pressure from the government. Basim Yusuf was forced to flee the country and he's been living in the United States ever since. I spoke with him in April just after his book, Revolution for Dummies had come out. Basim, I must tell you, I told my mother that I would be interviewing you and I explained to her

that for your early adult life until very recently, you were a heart surgeon, you were a doctor, and you dreamed of becoming a comedian. And she looked at me and she said, so he's an even bigger fool than you are, David. Well, yeah, this is quite a disappointment for any mother, especially in the Middle East.

Is your mom Jewish? She is. Exactly. That's exactly my point. We shared the same exact views about everything. If I had been a heart surgeon and then went off to make my living, picking talking dog cartoons, I couldn't imagine the heartbreak. But talk about that first.

decision of yours to leave a thriving practice and a hospital practice as a surgeon as a thoracic a thoracic surgeon and become a comedian I was a doctor waiting for my papers to come from Cleveland because I was accepted to work there at a pediatric art surgery fellow and I was I was waiting for my H1 B visa a revolution happened so this is a Tahrir Square yeah this Tahrir Square the revolution started and finished and then afterwards me and a couple of friends started to pitch the idea of maybe we need original arabic content for youtube and they said it was their idea but like i came up with the concept as that we should do political satire and uh we did the videos i posted

there online i didn't expect that more than 10 000 people would watch it suddenly we had 5 million and less than two months and I have every single TV station wanting to hire me But how did you have this talent? Were you just the kind of funny doctor who made occasional jokes about the patients?

I was a regular guy who would just say jokes like the other guy. I was not particularly a clown of the hospital or the class clown. I was just like a regular guy with like the good old regular Egyptian humor. That's it. What was the first episode about? The first episode about it is like how the media was trying to get people out of Tahrir Square,

trying to spread whatever rumors there is to tell them there are people having sex in the streets. There are different kind of nationalities conspiring against the country. That how this is all an external plot orchestrated by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, CIA. and the Musad altogether. There's one amazing moment in one of your shows where you ask a woman who's brought a kind of shopping bag full of stuff to Tahrir Square and you say, who's helping you buy these groceries?

Somebody asks her, how do you afford these groceries? She said, well, I get help from the Americans. And with perfect comic timing, she said, and Iran, Saba, etc. And that was so natural because this is what we have been hearing in the media. it drove us furious and mad to see how the media were belittling the people. And unfortunately, unfortunately, many people believed them.

There are people from outside, so they must be enemies, so this revolution must be bad. Now, you saw John Stewart as your main influence right away. I mean, the resemblance and the things that you were getting from him were not hard to see. So what was the power that you saw on the Daily Show? What was the attraction that you had to it? He was making fun of authority, and I liked that. And no one was doing this in Egypt. Not in, never, even in the Middle East.

There's nothing. The satire that was allowed to exist was social satire. It was good if you want to make fun of the people. But never Mubarak, never Sadat, never, Nasser. Oh, it's fine with the prime minister. But the president's no. I had 30 or 40 million people watching me, 50%. 30 or 40 million people were watching you.

Yeah. Towards the end, I was 40 million. I repeat that only because there is not a show in the United States that I can think of that comes anywhere remotely near that. I think a couple of million people watch John Stewart on a nightly basis. Yeah, we were the only show in the Arab world that was making fun of authority. Bus, at one point in your new book, Revolution for Dummies, you write, I was a satirist, not a freedom fighter.

Don't you think you were a little of both and are a little of both? No. I think this is part of... I mean, John Stewart would make the same protests all the time. He would say, you know, I'm not. not, I'm not, I'm just a satirist. I'm just making dumb jokes about Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. I, I, that's always struck me with all the respect and admiration to John as a little disingenuous. Uh, I, I don't think it's disingenuous because when everybody has got a job,

a satirist has got one job. What's your job? The satirist is not just to make fun or dumb jokes. The satirist his job is to bring more people to the table to discuss issues that might otherwise be difficult or dumb or dull to discuss. I talked about how they wanted to bring coal

back into, and they call it clean coal, right? Oh, you have clean coal too? Of course. Is it any cleaner there? Yeah, sure. I tried to speak about call. I tried to speak about sexual harassment. But I was not, we didn't

the luxury of changing things because authorities are just too powerful there. Tell me what the pressure was like. You were getting pressure all the time from the government to ratchet it back, to shut up, to calm down, to not make jokes about this or that or the other thing. And you felt that pressure from one avenue or another. What was the effect on you at home with your wife, with your small daughter? And the pressure took what form? The pressure was kind of I was taken for interrogation

I was there was a warrant for my arrest I went to be interrogated and persecuted for like six hours What was the interrogation like?

They were basically asking about my jokes did you mean to insult the president do you mean to insult Islam and it was like the most ridiculous interrogation ever

How did you answer questions like that? I tried to be a smart ass and then my lawyer was just advising me to not say this is not your audience is not your theater you didn't get a lot of laughs in the interrogation

Oh my God The prosecutor didn't laugh But the people in his office Was sitting there And they were laughing because he was reciting Jokes From The show

And they couldn't help it So that was But like under the military The pressure was ugly There were people at my theater Stretting to kill me In the audience No outside my theater

They're threatening to kill me Threating to burn the theater Shows being stopped There was like, you had a show stopped, how? They were jamming my satellite signal. You know, it was crazy. And so this is where members of my family and members of my friends started to hate me because I was speaking against the military.

Because the military in Egypt is sacred much more than religion. And until now, there are uncles and ants in my family who think that I am a traitor and I am a traitor to our military. That must have been painful. Very painful. people from my own flesh and blood that would actually share from on their Facebook pages

the hideous stuff that been said about me on the military uncles and aunts were sharing things that were attacks on you yeah and friends friends from school friends from school that knew me for 20 years but when I was critical against the military

they just like flipped out they were like they turned over night to be fascists and that was hard tell me about leaving the country. When and why did this happen? It's November 2014.

There was a big arbitration case that was going on forever between me and my ex-network who canceled me. And then I received a call and my friends told me, we lost the arbitration. You owe them $15 million or $13 million. Which was not exactly in your checking account, $13 million.

Not even a fraction of a fraction of that. They told me, the lawyer told me, listen, this is a political verdict. The next step, they would either confiscate your belongings or they will put you on a no-fly list and they will prevent you from going outside the country. I received this call at 2 p.m. 5 p.m. I was on a flight outside of Egypt. And this is when I escaped and I never went back. This was just an instant you knew right away you had to get on an airplane. Yeah, yeah. With your family? No, they followed later. I mean, I always had the hope that they will not.

I'll go after my wife, which, thank God they didn't. When you pick up the paper, as I'm sure you do like the rest of us, do you see similarities between Donald Trump and Cece? Other than both are being played by Putin? Yeah. They're like, they're both of, it's the same thing. It's the same empty rhetoric, the non-facts, the alternative fact, their blatant lies, the victimhood that like we have been,

wrong by everybody and the demagoguery that like we are going to prevail and make Egypt and make America great again. It's the same thing. What does it tell you about the direction that this country is going in now that you live here? Well, I wouldn't go that far and and be dramatic and say direction because at the end of the day you guys lost an election, just one election and hopefully you still have institutions. People have to have faith in the at the 400 years of democracy. because if Trump single-handedly brings down democracy in this country, then your democracy was very fragile. And I hate to think that.

So I was Uncle Bear, and he asked me to give him a diagnosis, and that was during the primaries. And I told him, well, America's body of democracy is still very healthy, but they just have a big orange mole on its ass. So after Trump being present for two months, he asked me, so, doctor, what's your diagnosis now? And I said, I think people should stop trying to diagnose the mall. Nobody understands the mall.

The mall could be a benign mold, a malignant mold, a Russian mole. Stop trying to understand the mall and focus on getting rid of the mall. So that was my diagnosis. Bassem, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all you've done and will do. Thank you.

Thank you. Basa Mucev's book is called Revolution for Dummies. Beth Newell and Sarah Popolardo are writers and the founders of the humor site called Reductress. Their sweet spot is to parody the magazines that offer women crash diets and amazing sex tips. And many of their editorials accuse women of making unreasonable demands for equality or even basic respect. Here's an example. This is from a piece that ran in Reductress on October 18, 2017. As allegations against Harvey Weinstein have mounted in the past week,

the public has become outraged at the blatant abuse of power against women. But this angry reaction begs an important question. Has PC culture gone too far now that one rapist is being held accountable? I live in America because of the freedom, specifically the freedom to do anything to a marginalized population without consequence or punishment, Seeing one powerful man get punished for his alleged abuse of hundreds of women is a threat to that. And the thing about PC culture is that it's a slippery slope. It starts with women asking for basic respect and human empathy, but where does it stop?

That's from Reductress, a piece called, Has PC Culture Gone Too Far Now That One Rapist is Being held accountable? Beth Newell and Sarah Papalardo, the founders of Reductress, sat down last April with the New Yorker's cartoon editor. Emma Allen. I've seen a redactress described in a lot of places as the feminist onion as a sort of probably sloppy shorthand. And I was wondering if also as a way to sort of describe what it is you guys do, you could say what's right about that and what's wrong about that. So what's right about it is that like we personally are feminists. The content can feel feminist because that's what informs our worldview and like why we exist and what we do. So, yeah, also it seems like anytime women do comedy with any sort of female bent or just reflecting their own identity as women or experiences, people like to call it feminist regardless of what they're doing.

We are feminist, but it's like sometimes it just feels like you're saying that because we're women. Right. And it's like The Onion, because as the Onion satirizes, sort of newspapers, this started pretty specifically as something that satirized. sort of women's magazines. Well, a big thing early on for us, I think, was that there was this trend of empowering women's media and this empowering tone in women's media that was still being used to sell things to women and prey on their insecurities. Yeah, like, you know, an ad campaign using all differently sized women in order to sell

firming lotion and just kind of these gaping contradictions and messaging that were constantly happening. Yeah, always like all these elaborate tricks to please your man and like no mention of your own pleasure whatsoever. Meanwhile, like men are incredibly easy to please sexually. Like, why were we given all these directives? So much wasted ice. So then you guys sort of over time have expanded the world of sort of mommy blogs and like other women-centric internet spaces. I feel like there's this whole sort of rah-rah sisterhood.

type of feminism that turns very quickly when you don't agree with the very specific opinions of the people in the group. Yeah. I think a lot of women think that they're pro-women when they're actually just pro their very specific needs as a woman. I think it's also part of our own internalized sexism, even like the most feminist among us. Like if a famous man screws up, we're like, oh, but, you know, he was really good on cheers

or something. You know, like, we're like, we can view it in context, but when a woman does it, So we're always like, she's not feminist. Screw her. Like, I'm done with her. And, like, burning her books and everything. It's like we just can't understand that women are flawed. Yeah. Well, one thing in the sort of world of satire post-Trump is this crazy conflation of fake news and satire and confusion about the distinction between fake news and satire. And I thought it was interesting because one of your slogans is the one and only fake women's news magazine. And have you guys had any sort of like weird, confused backlash? Yeah, we definitely had some people who thought our pieces were real.

One was before the election. If Trump wins, I'm moving to Alaska. And somebody wrote, I think, like a 6,000 word think piece about why Alaska's in this country, I guess. All these words, just to say Alaska is in the United States. Yeah, yeah. People get pretty riled up. Yeah, I got an email from someone that was like, your piece about Beyonce being a member of the Illuminati,

I'm trying to source this. And if you could provide me with the clips and very studious about it. But to put that into context, we also get emails asking for cited sources for headlines like, we ask these 10 women how they found success and most of them said pretend to be a horse. Yeah.

We do. We'll get like, angry tweets online that are like, you're fake news, and then you click on the people's profiles, and they're just like the most openly sexist, racist people. So you're like, yeah, I'm okay with that criticism. So in the whole realm of clickbait versus real news, are you aspiring with your satire to, like, lead people toward the more complicated ideas, or is it like satire can also just exist as diversion? It's a mix of both. I think in a perfect world, our goal is to try to lead people to the truth and be sort of ethical about our satire in a sense.

That said, I think we all need diversion at a certain point. And it's been an exhausting year for satirists like us, I think. It's work, you know. And so sometimes we just have to blow off some steam and make a dumb poop joke. Well, I mean, also, like, satire historically getting people to laugh at a thing before you get people to look at the deeper, stagnating issues is a pretty good inn. Yeah, especially because a lot of what we write asks the reader to kind of look within themselves and the things that they do.

Humor is a really important way to kind of break that wall. Because people don't love being criticized. Yeah, I think when it's done best, I think it's done with at least a small element of love. The New Yorker's Emma Allen talking with some. Sarah Papalardo and Beth Newell of the satire website, Reductress. You can find more of their work at New YorkerRadio.org. The holidays are at time to see friends, try new things, have fun. And recently, two of the New Yorkers cartoonists, Emily Flake,

and Drew Dernovich decided to try out an escape room. If you haven't heard about this, escape rooms are a genre of immersive entertainment, where you and your friends get locked into a room that looks a lot like a prison cell or a dungeon or a dungeon or a space station. And you have to find clues and secret mechanisms to get yourselves out.

Clostrophobics are advised to stay home. Here's Emily Flake and Drew Dernovich, along with the radio hours, Sarah Nix, who tagged along as a sort of chaperone. Does anybody need the bathroom? No, thank you. So we're in this little room. It looks a lot like a jail cell.

There's a cot over there. A little sink, a mirror above it, a table. The walls are concrete. They look like somebody's been shipping away them. The thing that doesn't look like a prison cell is there's a TV screen up in the corner here. Oh, there's a message coming through on it. So the screen is saying, welcome prisoners, please paste electronic devices in security box on desk. Now would you kindly close the door? Is this Matt Lowers escape room?

Yeah. Jeez. So we have an hour to escape. What happens if we don't get out? Do they sell us? Oh, we have to use our brain. It's the worst. It's a brain singular, so it's just one of us. Right. That's you, pal. I'm going to use my female intuition.

I would encourage you to think about the ways in which this is or is not like being at home for the holidays. I'm definitely trapped in an unpleasant room, but nobody's talking to me about Trump, so it's actually kind of preferable. Can we book this for Christmas? Can we book this for Christmas? A flashlight. Let's use it to look under. Thanks. Let's see.

Oh, there are definitely bed bugs on this mattress. How isn't it like the holidays? My parents don't have nearly as good taste in furniture. My parents wallpapered over the areas where I attempted to claw my way out. There's a locked box by the bed. We can find a key or I bet there's a code somewhere. get into that box. Oh.

Let's see. There's a bunch of numbers on the wall. Woohoo! Are we done now? Let's try it backwards. Oh, hey. Let's make that happen with my mind. Hey.

Oh, oh. Oh my. We escaped into another room. This doesn't feel like an escape. So the door, that locker door just opened into another little room. It looks like somebody's busted through the wall at the back of the lockering. There's a couple of other lockers here, smaller lockers in another door. Oh, there's a lock on this door into the exam room. This is just like

my OBGYN's office. There is a boxing glove. Oh, there's a bunch of boxing gloves. Against all my good instincts, I'm sticking my hand inside of the previously used sweaty boxing glue. Oh, boxing glove has a cake on it. It is like the holidays in that there's a rising sense of panic and claustrophobia. That's a lot like the holidays. In the holidays there's usually a refrigerator for a beer or whiskey that provides an instant escape. Yeah, I mean, the tension in holiday meals is usually not as hard to parse. It's usually pretty clear where that's coming from.

Although I might be saying that because I've studied those puzzles for 40 years. I usually leave Glad to be alive, so that's within the holiday spirit. You guys, I think we're out of time. Oh, no. Now we have to live here. Emily Flake and Drew Dernovich, cartoonist's extraordinaire. They were at Brain Escape, that's with an X, in Manhattan, along with Sarah Nicks of the Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I want to wish you a happy new year, and next week, we'll have a long sit-down with Jerry Seinfeld. It's going to be fun, so please join us, and happy New Year. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. With help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Dean Renee Miller, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.