Defectors

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

After putting up the previous post, I wondered if maybe there actually had been some Moussa Koussa jokes. So I check Andy Borowitz’s tweets. Borowitz is a funny guy (one of today’s tweets:

“What does Fox News do on April Fool's Day?” is a question akin to “What do slutty nurses do on Halloween?”

In fact, he did have some Koussa tweets, but they were mostly jokes about the name, not the man. For example,

Gaddafi Replaces Moussa Koussa with New Foreign Minister, Banana Fanna

Now, here’s the sociological connection. Andy Borowitz was a sociology researcher. Well, not quite. But he appears in the initial footnote of a classic article, Wendy Griswold’s “American Character and the American Novel” (AJS 1981).

The indefatigable research team consisted of Andy Borowitz . . . .

Clearly, Borowitz coulda been a contender. Instead, he turned his back on sociological research (maybe he wasn’t all that indefatigable after all) and went with comedy. I guess it was a choice between sending out reprints or cashing in residuals. In Hollywood, he created “Fresh Prince,” which ran for six seasons and is probably still being recycled today somewhere on cable.