“One of the funniest people in America” according to “CBS Sunday Morning,” Andy Borowitz will discuss his book, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber, at The Progressive Forum Thursday, September 21, at 7:30 p.m. CT at the Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater. Paying attendees will receive a free copy of Profiles in Ignorance, and Borowitz will sign books at the evening’s conclusion.
Reserved seats are $45 and $70, and $150 tickets include a reception with the speaker. Tickets are available online at ProgressiveForumHouston.org, and at 800-514-3849 Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. EST. They will also be available at the door on event night (card transactions only).
Cash bar and dinner service are available in the Wortham Grand Foyer beginning at 6 p.m. when building doors open. Cullen Theater doors open at 7 p.m.
The event is generously sponsored by Poppi Georges-Massey, Don Griffin and Mary Cubanski, and Ann Hamilton.
“It’s time for humor!” said Progressive Forum founder Randall Morton. “This may be one of the most refreshing events in Houston this year."
About Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber
Andy Borowitz, “one of the funniest people in America” (“CBS Sunday Morning”), brilliantly “chronicles our embrace of anti-intellectualism” (Walter Isaacson) in American politics, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle, from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, to its apotheosis in Donald J. Trump.
Borowitz has been called a “Swiftian satirist” (The Wall Street Journal) and “one of the country’s finest satirists” (The New York Times). Millions of fans and New Yorker readers enjoy his satirical news column “The Borowitz Report.” Now, in Profiles in Ignorance, he delivers “a wittily alarming polemic that tracks the evolution of American politics from grounds for gravitas to festival of idiocy” (The New York Times).
Borowitz argues that over the past 50 years, American politicians have grown increasingly allergic to knowledge, and mass media have encouraged the election of ignoramuses by elevating candidates who are better at performing than thinking. Starting with Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for governor of California in 1966 and culminating with the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House, Borowitz shows how, during the age of 24-hour news and social media, the US has elected politicians to positions of great power whose lack of the most basic information is terrifying. In addition to Reagan, Quayle, Bush, Palin, and Trump, Borowitz covers a host of congresspersons, senators, and governors who have helped lower the bar over the past five decades.
Profiles in Ignorance aims to make us both laugh and cry: Laugh at the idiotic antics of these public figures, and cry at the cataclysms these icons of ignorance have caused. But most importantly, the book delivers a call to action and a cause for optimism: History doesn’t move in a straight line, and we can change course if we act now.
About Andy Borowitz
Borowitz is an award-winning comedian and New York Times bestselling author. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from Harvard College, where he became president of the Harvard Lampoon. In 1998, he began contributing humor to The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” and “Talk of the Town” departments, and in 2001, he created “The Borowitz Report,” a satirical news column, which has millions of readers around the world. In 2012, The New Yorker began publishing “The Borowitz Report.” As a storyteller, he hosted “Stories at the Moth” from 1999 to 2009. As a comedian, he has played to sold-out venues around the world, including during his national tour, “Make America Not Embarrassing Again,” from 2018 to 2020. He is the first-ever winner of the National Press Club’s humor award. He lives with his family in New Hampshire.