The Golden Age of the American Idiot

10:02Vinson Cunningham:The show is called America's Dumbest, yes. Nation's dumbest. Nation's dumbest. There you go. Nation's dumbest. Of course, humiliation is a huge part of it. So here's what I thought.

10:12Naomi Fry:It's a dunce cap in the form of a game show. Correct. Here's what I thought. Loved it.

10:21Vinson Cunningham:It is. And also, I think it's absolutely beyond stupid and dumb. So what do you love about it?

10:27Naomi Fry:I'm eager to hear.

10:29Vinson Cunningham:It may just be that I've been starved for the game show format because it's not my usual go-to. It may be that I've been wending my way through Widow's Bay. What I really needed was to actually sit down and for half an hour watch some people get mildly humiliated while being asked to complete a bunch of dumb, stupid challenges that have nothing to do with intelligence. And here's what I mean. The thing about this show is that it itself is stupid. I am old enough to remember games like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Who wants to be a millionaire? Let alone Jeopardy, which of course has been a mainstay forever.

11:10Vinson Cunningham:And the point of game shows like that was that, especially the Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader from the early 2000s, was that it actually was testing various skills you had. You know, like an easy question might be something like, what is the fewest number of coins to get to 99 cents? Something like that. You have to think for one second. I would have failed that, by the way. You know, Nomi, you'd be fine. You'd think it through. Whereas something like Nation's Dumbest, in the lightning round at the end, where they're under the bright lights and Andrew Yang is after having made a fool of himself.

11:45Naomi Fry:Sweating up a storm. Yeah.

11:46Vinson Cunningham:They're being asked random bits of trivia that have nothing to do with if you're dumb or if you're not dumb. Like, who's the creator of Fenty Beauty, which pop star created Fenty Beauty. Either you know that's Rihanna or you don't. But it doesn't say anything about you in terms of intelligence. It's not an important or meaningful base of knowledge. So the show itself is dumb. And the other thing about the show that I think is very of our moment is that, of course, it's all celebrities. Those older shows used to be about kind of the average schmo. And the fun of it was seeing— Not Hollywood squares.

12:18Vinson Cunningham:Not Hollywood squares. That's very true. But the older kind of like, are you smart or are you dumb games were about average people and seeing the stuff that they had. And the premise here is that celebrities are supposed to be stupid. That's why they have like an Andrew Yang type to be the representative smart celebrity. They have Hilaria Baldwin, who's a celebrity just for being a celebrity, who's not dumb. She's a lot of things that are maybe not worth mentioning. She's a very confusing figure.

12:49Alexandra Schwartz:She made up weird things about her ancestry and past and heritage, et cetera.

12:54Vinson Cunningham:But, like, do I think she can identify an animal who lays eggs when given a board of options? I do. Can Carmen Electra? Like, probably not. So the show I did find to be entertaining. It's also kind of a spectacle. You know, they're at one point dangling them in a kind of padded airplane suit over a map of the world.

13:12Naomi Fry:JoJo Siwa and Steve-O.

13:13Vinson Cunningham:I forgot to mention Steve-O is one of the celebrities from Jackass. God bless him. You know, I didn't think it had much to say about whether any of these people are smart or dumb, but I did think it said a lot about how smart or dumb we as a culture are. And the answer is that we're dumb. What about you, Vincent? What do you think?

13:29Alexandra Schwartz:That's, I think what you just pointed out is so important because it's like one of the questions it brought up for me is what do we even mean when we say dumb? Or to turn it around, what in here is like what is the substance of intelligence? And is that sort of, are those notions, can they be national? I love the fact that it's nation's dumbest. You know, it's like, do Americans think that intelligence is about a kind of trivia knowledge or whatever we think of as, quote unquote, common knowledge? What do we mean when we say smart? And what are the anxieties that we face when we are put on the spot about our intelligence?

14:13Alexandra Schwartz:I thought it was really fascinating because like watching people judge themselves based on these things. There's one where they ask Andrew Yang in this little pre-K classroom, what is an exercise that includes a jump, a plank, this or that? The answer was burpee. Andrew Yang had never heard of burpees. But he had already messed up the challenge before. And you could just see him become physically smaller because, you know, he thinks himself intelligent. It's like another question. Does going to Columbia or whatever he was talking about, does that make you smart? I don't know, man. So all these things that are markers of intelligence, whatever it is, common knowledge or knowledge of the past, trivia, all these different things and how they make us feel.

15:02Alexandra Schwartz:That's what I was watching. Like, what kind of humiliation can be brought to bear by different sort of fields of knowledge? I always like Ice-T, so I was glad to see him introducing himself as ice to people, sweet. Stuff like that was cool. There was something interesting in this.

15:18Naomi Fry:Yeah.

15:19Alexandra Schwartz:Is anybody here playing up their stupidity? Is anybody here trying to create a new lane for themselves as America's Idiot-in-Chief?

15:28Vinson Cunningham:I really think that people were sweetly trying to do their darned best. Yes, I agree. And I think that came out most obviously at the first challenge.

15:37Alexandra Schwartz:In this logic test, they have to hold both ends of our homecoming sash at the same time. The problem is the ends are too far apart for one person to grab. The solution is to attach a heavy object like the baseball glove to one end of the sash to make a pendulum.

15:51Naomi Fry:I would have failed that, by the way.

15:53Vinson Cunningham:Well, it wasn't immediately evident unless you have experience with pendulums. Let's just say that. Let's just say that. I was like, I don't know. None of us need to know the answers to everything. It's okay to be idiots about some stuff and not about other stuff. And it's also okay to hugely enjoy the anxiety of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. He's still wearing the mask button, by the way. Yeah, I mean, this is just, and he only brought one pair of clothes because he was so convinced he was going to leave the first day. So he really has become the heel, I think.

16:24Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. In a minute, idiots through the ages. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

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18:29Naomi Fry:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's election fraud obsession. He described interference in the election in alarming terms that involved almost everything but little green Martians, honestly. But there was absolutely no final bottom line where he was able to prove that a single vote was stolen in the election. Join me, Susan Glasser, and my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

19:13Alexandra Schwartz:So as we've started to get into, of course, idiocy is not just a fact of human life. It also informs recurring characters. It's a kind of trope in our culture. Do you guys have favorite idiots?

19:27Naomi Fry:So many. I was just re-watching Austin Powers with my daughter, Nina, and it's about just like an absolutely happy idiot who is constantly, you know, grinning his way through a variety of disasters, mostly caused by him. He's a cheerful dummy, and it's the funniest thing in the world. It's the funniest character in the world. And there's a line we keep repeating to each other. There's a scene in the first Austin Powers where he pours himself a cup of coffee. Cool. This coffee smells like shit.

20:13Alexandra Schwartz:It is shit, Austin. Oh, good.

20:17Naomi Fry:Then it's not just me. And of course, he takes a big sip anyway. It's a bit nutty. And it's just like the complete happy obliviousness of this character. I mean, I just can't stop laughing. I could laugh and laugh.

20:33Vinson Cunningham:The happy idiot is a very important figure. We need the happy idiots. And I think many of us, you know, who are unhappy wish that we were them. It's just what a simpler life. What a wonderful way to be. And, of course, the happy idiot often exists to bring the kind of subtle, sly, but miserable person into sharper contrast. There's another happy idiot. I love David Putty from Seinfeld.

20:56Naomi Fry:Oh, Putty.

20:57Vinson Cunningham:A wonderful idiot. Yes. He's just stolid. He just has nothing that he's thinking about, and he likes it that way. And Elaine is dating him, Elaine, who is hypercritical but sexually attracted to him, and it's a great pairing of neurotic unhappy and dumb happy. It's fantastic. Putty is great. Another more recent idiot who I very much enjoy, and I know I'm not alone, is the Jennifer Coolidge character on The White Lotus as Tanya.

21:27Naomi Fry:Oh, that's a good one.

21:28Vinson Cunningham:A true, simple soul who is so enervating because she exists in this bubble of privilege where she really thinks that everyone's job in life is to facilitate hers. But you can't really hold it against her because she's stupid.

21:45Naomi Fry:Aloha.

21:45Alexandra Schwartz:Are you Ms. McQuillard?

21:47Naomi Fry:Quad. One syllable.

21:50Alexandra Schwartz:McQuillard.

21:51Naomi Fry:Well, two syllables. But the second part is one syllable. Why? Why? Is it Gaelic? I don't know. I really don't know.

22:03Vinson Cunningham:I was just, listen, I'm in desperate need of a massage. Is that possible? I think the definition of stupidity here is just being totally unquestioning about the world around you and the way it works.

22:15Naomi Fry:I think the lack of curiosity, where it's like you could know more. You have access to know more with this character, with the Jennifer Coolidge character. You know, she has all the privilege in the world. And yet she is locked into her dumbness and her suffering as well because she's not a happy idiot. She's an unhappy idiot. Yeah, that's true. And she can't figure out why because she can't see anyone else. So she can't even see her own privileged existence.

22:43Alexandra Schwartz:One of my favorites, and I think this goes to like the hypes of idiots, the sort of taxonomy of idiots. We mentioned Dr. Drew from 30 Rock. I was thinking about Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock, played by Tracy Morgan, who I wrote about in The New Yorker a couple years back. How he's like kind of just, part of it is just a zaniness and a nihilism. And part of it is like we come to know kind of like trauma. A pack of wild dogs took over and successfully ran to Wendy's. The sewer people stole my skateboard. The projects I lived in was named after Zachary Taylor, generally considered to be one of the worst presidents of all time.

23:24I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo.

23:27Alexandra Schwartz:I often have thought that it was a really interesting way of playing around with, like, one of the great types of American idiot, which is, like, also a woeful type, which is, like, kind of the minstrel. One of my, a book that I've always been fascinated by is, it's called American Humor, and it's by this wonderful writer, Constance Rourke. And she was trying to sort of, again, achieve a taxonomy of American comic types. So she goes into like the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, you know, the Davy Crockett type. and one of those is the sort of let's face it, a lot of American comedy is built on this idea of the sort of almost nostalgically stupid black person, you know and I always thought that that was a really sensitive thing of like, this guy, part of why he's apart from everybody else is because he's black part of why his jokes don't land or his ethos doesn't match other people is because he's black and this actually, you know, has something to do with Tracy Morgan's real experience on SNL.

24:27Alexandra Schwartz:He talks about it, like bringing his, trying to bring his castmates to the strip club and all this weird stuff, and everybody's just like, what is wrong? Is Tracy okay? And Tracy Jordan does stuff like that. And thinking about him makes me think of other types as well. I mean, there's also, you mentioned Jennifer Coolidge. She's like a type of, like, a great American type is also like the dumb blonde, right? Being stupid in American comedy is not just about race, it's also about gender as well, right?

24:56Vinson Cunningham:Oh, yeah. The dumb blonde is a fascinating archetype because very often, if you look more closely at those stories, it's really about how the dumb blonde is not that dumb. And very often those stories are about revealing the cruelties or the pettinesses or the stupidities of other people around that character. My mind immediately went to Born Yesterday, the George Cukor movie. Have you guys seen that movie? Not in a long time. No. I actually grew, it's a 1950s movie, and I actually grew up with the remake where Melanie Griffith plays the dumb blonde role and used to watch that movie over and over again, this movie from 1993.

25:34Vinson Cunningham:But the original stars Judy Holliday as the kind of woman who talks like this and is not that smart and is with a man played by Roderick Crawford who is a businessman who wants to use Billy, as her name is, to get in with various politicians in D.C. He's going down to D.C. He wants to marry her so that she can have spousal privilege and nothing that she knows of his ill-doings can be revealed. And she wises up. She gets educated by a man in this case.

26:08Naomi Fry:Well, I look at the paper sometimes, but I just never understand it. So what's the sense? I tell you what you do. You look through these, and anything you don't understand, why, just make a circle around it. And then tomorrow I'll explain whatever I can. All right? All right.

26:26Vinson Cunningham:But you can see this archetype elsewhere. You can see it, of course, in Clueless, the fantastic Amy Heckerling movie where Cher Horowitz starts out as a total ditz and ends up getting a bit of backbone and smarts a bit, we can say. and you see it in Legally Blonde with Elle Woods, who is such a great character. I was rewatching Legally Blonde the other day, the archetypal sorority girl who gets into Harvard in the most implausible possible way and then proceeds to be really good at what she does.

27:01Alexandra Schwartz:Because isn't it the first cardinal rule of perm maintenance that you're forbidden to wet your hair for at least 24 hours after getting a perm at the risk of deactivating the ammonium thyglocolate? Yes.

27:13Naomi Fry:And wouldn't somebody who's had, say, 30 perms before in their life be well aware of this rule?

27:18Alexandra Schwartz:And if, in fact, you weren't washing your hair, as I suspect you weren't because your curls are still intact, wouldn't you have heard the gunshot? And if, in fact, you had heard the gunshot, Brooke Windham—

27:27Vinson Cunningham:So, the dumb blonde thing is, yeah, its own kind of hero's journey, interestingly.

27:34Naomi Fry:In the matter of the state versus Brooke Windham, this case is dismissed. Mrs. Windham, you're free to go.

27:43Vinson Cunningham:Like this early aughts, there was like a sexually dimorphic kind of stupidity happening. On the one hand, you had the dudes of Jackass in 2000 who were like setting their penises on fire and jumping off of tall buildings and catapulting themselves out of various devices. And it's amazing that any of them survived with their lives. And then you had the trust up to the nines, Ditz, who's performing that to the nth degree on like the female side of things. This kind of very like masculine, feminine visions of also a specific kind of American stupidity where like the world kind of doesn't – it's a myopia.

28:24The world isn't existing outside of your own pleasures and entertainments.

28:28Naomi Fry:Yeah, I think, you know, the era, the George W. Bush years, I think, were kind of, we could say, a heyday for this particular type of stupidity, Alex, that you're defining here. You know, on the one hand, the kind of like masculinist shenanigans of a bunch of dummies. And on the other hand, yeah, the kind of like sexualized dits. And on MTV as well, Carmen Electra, just who we just saw in Nation Dumbest, or like Jenny McCarthy, you know, these kind of scantily clad hostesses also on MTV. Yeah, I think MTV was a hub, you know, kind of like these early reality experiments and game show experiments that were exactly about, like, can we not look at what's going on outside?

29:23Naomi Fry:You know, these were years of war, but we don't want to look at that. And instead, we're going to kind of like look inward into our kind of like hyper-gendered games in which certainly learnedness doesn't matter.

29:42Vinson Cunningham:Well, idiocy was also at the height of—it's interesting you see it as a remove from the political realities of the time because idiocy was a huge part of political discourse in the early 2000s. A big liberal, smug liberal talking point was the dumbness of George W. Bush. Yes. His mispronunciation of words. It was like Dan Quayle potato on steroids. Yes, exactly. Choking on pretzels. I mean, and on and on and on and on. There was this idea that a dumb man was in charge. And then you had stuff like American Idiot, the Green Day song, which was railing against the culture and railing. We talked about protest songs on our American Music episode a few episodes ago.

30:26Vinson Cunningham:I think American Idiot has a little asterisk place in the protest song genre of this kind of emo creed occur about the stupidity of American politics and mass media and pleasure culture and what it's like living in the midst of that. And that kind of encapsulates the whole situation. Don't want to be an American idiot. Don't want a nation under the new media.

30:52Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, it's almost worth it to quote some of those lyrics. Don't want to be an American idiot. Don't want a nation under the new media. And can you hear the sound of hysteria? The subliminal mindfuck America. Welcome to a new kind of tension all across the alienation where everything isn't meant to be okay. Television dreams of tomorrow. We're not the ones who are meant to follow, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's interesting because it does follow a pattern of anxiety about what is the source of American idiocy. It's something about education and—

31:30Naomi Fry:It's about the media, the new media.

31:32Alexandra Schwartz:It's about the media. It's about propaganda. It's about the quote-unquote subliminal mindfuck. That something about the structure of our society incentivizes idiocy, and idiocy becomes like a handmaiden to all other kinds of malfeasance. It's like a necessary condition for all the rest of the things that we hate about America, right? Speaking of Jackass Nomi, you recently saw the newest Jackass, poignantly titled Jackass Best and Last. What do you think about it?

32:07Naomi Fry:Guys, I don't know what it was. I mean, I went to see it at 11 a.m. on a Thursday. It was me and two other people. And it might have been too early. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what it was. It might have been my mood. Don't blame yourself, Nomi. Okay, I have to say I remain stone-faced in terms of laughs. I just didn't feel it. And the thing is, the gap between me totally not feeling it and then the collective laughter of all the guys. Of the jackasses? Of the Jackass crew as Steve-O gets his prostate examined by a robot. Oh, no. You know, with like a metal finger with, you know, smeared in peanut butter for some reason stuck up Steve-O's rectum.

33:06Naomi Fry:I'm like, okay, I think it's time to wrap it up. Like, I think we've had enough. I'm sorry.

33:13Vinson Cunningham:Well, it kind of comes back to what we were talking about.

33:19Naomi Fry:Now she laughs. Now I'm laughing. Look who's laughing now. I feel like people who grew up. Okay. So actually, this is interesting. The night of the morning, I went to see Jackass Best and Last Bright and Early. I had dinner with our colleague and friend Eric Latch. And I told him I went to see Jackass Best and Last this morning. And he was like, wasn't it amazing? It turns out he had gone to see it. What a response. As well. And he was like, I thought it was so funny. I love it. But, you know, Eric, like, was, you know, a sweaty teenager with his fellow, you know, six other, like, sweaty teenage friends.

34:00Naomi Fry:But he's not alone.

34:01Vinson Cunningham:Watching it. I mean, Alyssa Wilkinson in the Times saw it as a beacon of healthy masculinity. I think we are in such a state now in the culture.

34:08Naomi Fry:I mean, grasping at straws, honestly.

34:09Vinson Cunningham:Well, that men spending time together and enjoying each other's company, even if they're doing it while getting prostate exams from a robot, does count as some good bonding time.

34:19Naomi Fry:The bar is low. As Nina says, the bar is in hell. Yeah.

34:29Alexandra Schwartz:When we're back, are we living through the world's stupidest era? That's In A Minute on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

34:46Naomi Fry:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's election fraud obsession. He described interference in the election in alarming terms that involved almost everything but little green Martians, honestly. But there was absolutely no final bottom line where he was able to prove that a single vote was stolen in the election. Join me, Susan Glasser, and my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer every Friday on the political scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

35:39Vinson Cunningham:shaping the future? Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of

35:44Alexandra Schwartz:constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

35:58Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham.

36:00Vinson Cunningham:I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

36:04Alexandra Schwartz:Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy-brand with it.

36:13Vinson Cunningham:Right, we take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

36:26Naomi Fry:We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.

36:30Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture, Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

36:35Naomi Fry:K-pop to the Kennedys. From horror movies to heated rivalry.

36:39Vinson Cunningham:From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights. Great expectations to Desperate Housewives.

36:44Alexandra Schwartz:That's what we're talking about over here.

36:46Naomi Fry:We're having fun. It's Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

37:01We've been talking largely about the one genus of idiot, one species, the American idiot.

37:10Alexandra Schwartz:But of course, the American idiot is not alone. And of course, that species has plenty of predecessors. I was thinking while preparing for this episode that you can find them in the Louvre. You can find them in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Along the edges of Bibles and other books or in picture frames, this little impish-looking guy with flappy ears and a yellow and red hat and often with like a donkey puppet next to him. the medieval fool who sort of plays and jests at the edges of the life of the court and can kind of mutate in terms of class position and sort of make fun of rich and poor alike.

38:02Alexandra Schwartz:The fool more broadly has been with us for a long time. Do you guys have favorite sort of places in history where we've had orientations toward stupidity that, I don't know, appeal to you, gall you, stand out to you with regard to our conversation?

38:20Vinson Cunningham:Well, I'm big on the Shakespearean fool, I would say. The one who is guileless but actually full of guile and can express things freely that others cannot express precisely because the premise is that he is speaking from a position of ignorance. And there are many examples, but one of the more famous examples is King Lear's fool. King Lear divides up his kingdom into thirds. Two of his daughters say hooray. One says no thank you. He freaks the fuck out. And the fool right away points out that the real fool is, of course, the king. This was not a wise and intelligent thing to do. This was rash and vain and disaster is forthcoming.

39:09Vinson Cunningham:So the fool who speaks the truth is a very appealing figure. I mean, this makes me think of another genre of fool that I enjoy, that I came to as a kid through, Nomi, you probably did too, through the stories of Chelm, the kind of Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of the fools from Chelm. Herschelah. Or as they're called, the wise men of Chelm. And this is, it's not even that old a tradition. I think, I was looking into it. I think it dates to the mid-19th century, and it comes from a much older German and even English tradition of the idea of a town full of fools. An angel is passing over, distributing one fool to each town on earth, and then the angel's bag gets a hole in it, and all the fools drop in hell.

39:47Vinson Cunningham:And they do a bunch of really silly, foolish stuff. And we clearly need these stories. We need them to express our own sense of foolishness and to have an outlet for that, I think, and to be able to localize it and place it and make it safe in some ways to confront. Perhaps that's more of a modern psychological take on it. They're also just really funny. The antics of them are really funny.

40:12Alexandra Schwartz:yeah i think you know to take it quickly back to shakespeare who at least in my understanding is sort of uh updating and revivifying the idea of the sort of the the medieval fool my favorite fool never appears in a shakespeare play and to your point of needing this figure um he's he's he's already dead when we come to know of him he's uh yorick hamlet picks up the skull of yorick the dead fool, or at least, you know, in the portrayals, he has the skull. And he says, you know, alas, poor Yorick. He was, you know, this guy of what he says is infinite jest. And there's something about Hamlet's permanent grief that won't allow humor, right?

40:53Alexandra Schwartz:And so it's almost like the sorriness of his state as this permanent mourner is almost symbolized by the absence of the fool, When this absolutely necessary quantity, not just stupidity, but as he says, jest, if we don't have it, something is wrong. There's a permanent shroud over us. I think it's like a really, to your point about the necessity of these figures, it really calls out to me.

41:21Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think there's also something about being able to laugh at yourself. Like, you know, even going farther back, I was reading a bit of this book called A Short History of Stupidity by this British critic, Stuart Jeffreys, and our own Josh Rothman, who has appeared on the show, reviewed it, I think, last year for The New Yorker. And it's very interesting because Jeffreys talks about the ancient Greeks who distinguished between being ignorant, which is normal. You just don't have the information. Maybe you don't know who created Fenty Beauty, and that's okay. That's fine. And that's fine because you can learn it.

41:58Vinson Cunningham:And being stupid, which is not wanting to go on any kind of discovery, not a journey of discovery, not wanting to improve your understanding of the world, not wanting to gain information, just wanting to stay in the dark. So there is a kind of, there can be a real joyfulness in being dumb. Like, oops, I can't believe I did that. And now I've learned from that. And now I have a different perspective than I had before.

42:29Naomi Fry:I mean, I do think, just to go back to Nation's Dumbest, I do think it's enjoyable in some ways to watch maybe because of this very reason, right? You know, I mean, the bar, again, is quite low. But, like, Little Huddy has heard about Darwin for the first time. He did learn about Darwin. That was good.

42:49Vinson Cunningham:That was very good.

42:51Alexandra Schwartz:So, like, that's when I was wondering whether this was a put-on. I don't think so. No, I truly think Vincent.

42:57Vinson Cunningham:I truly think he didn't know. I truly think not. And this does bring us back to the question of if we're living in the stupidest time, which we may be.

43:07Alexandra Schwartz:Well, I mean, this distinction that we've laid down, okay, there is an educative stupidity through which we all must pass, right? We can't know until we don't know kind of thing. But there is a stubborn stupidity, which, you know, I think we've all been kind of skirting around the edges of this in our conversation, is on flagrant display vis-a-vis politics, you know? Yes. That there is a stubborn anti-intellectualism, an idea that to be an intellectual, the assault on the academy is premised on precisely this, that to sort of continue in our quest for knowledge is a kind of elitism that has to be punished and eventually stamped out.

43:52Alexandra Schwartz:it does seem that so much of what we see in our politics sadly does revolve around a kind of that other thing the willful stupidity that will admit no learning yeah i think that's really true

44:04Naomi Fry:i mean i think part of what i've been feeling in 2019 i wrote a piece kind of for like uh that towards the end of 2019 i wrote a piece that was kind of like summing up the year and it was like the year in stupidity, right? And it was kind of a piece where I listed a bunch of instances of stupidity, some of which involved Trump and the Trump administration, Rudy Giuliani was his right hand man then and so on. There have been many, many examples of stupidity since I've written that thing. Everything that's happening with the White House, you know, the ballroom renovations, Of course, the reflecting pool, the absolute stupidest thing where it's like, I'm going to Trump is like, I'm going to renovate the, you know, the the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

44:57Naomi Fry:I'm going to paint it American flag blue in for a mere 16 million dollars. And of course, immediately it starts peeling and looking like shit and like algae develops and et cetera. Like, I can't even say at this point. I kind of feel not fazed by it. You know, if in 2019, I would have been like, I can't believe this is a reality. Now I'm just like another day at the office, you know.

45:26Alexandra Schwartz:So given all this, and we mentioned maybe the sort of post-911 era as a heyday of stupidity in our culture, are we living through another one? At least in terms of have we fallen back in love with the smooth-brained figure? Is it doing something special for us today that maybe had been dormant in a recent past?

45:53Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I mean, yes, yes, we're absolutely at a peak of stupid. Do I think it's the highest peak? It's not. We can always climb the mountain a little bit higher. It's there for us to climb. But yes, I think a lot supports the idea that we're in a bit of a stupid moment. We're outsourcing a lot of thinking to computers and AI. Let's just start there. People are using such tools for basic conversational purposes and basic communication purposes. And the errors and mistakes appear everywhere from term papers to legal briefs to what have you. We're just kind of littered with – we have terms for this – slop, brain rot.

46:32Vinson Cunningham:The experience that we all know so well of your brain just kind of vibrating wordlessly as a stream of videos and images, often of people doing some very amusingly stupid things, parades in front of your eyeballs. This is stupid. Do I enjoy it? Sure. But it's not great. That's going on. We have the end of reading. Like everybody's telling us about it. People are reading less. Remember that whole thing with Columbia professors from a few months ago, Columbia professors saying that their freshman students don't know how to read? We hear this. I hear this anecdotally all the time. That's a problem.

47:09Vinson Cunningham:So there's a kind of like critical thinking ability that does seem to be atrophying on a cultural level. And I'm not pointing fingers outside myself either, pointing them right at myself. I feel the rot. I think we all feel the rot. I know.

47:26Naomi Fry:I do feel stupider myself. I have to say. Do you? I think I do. I'm just like, I think, you know, that kind of vibrating brain thing you were pointing to. It's not that you're necessarily hearing that much new information. You're just hearing, like, versions of the same thing over and over again from a variety of, you know, reels, articles, bullet points, you know, AI summaries. Like it's, you know, and there was a recent article in New York Magazine. New York Magazine, in fact, had an article by the writer Lane Brown, who quoted data that suggested that the average IQ is going, it used to reliably go up over the course of the 20th century.

48:19Naomi Fry:And now it's going down, my friends. And part of the reason, at least, that Brown is suggesting for this is the kind of assault our senses are receiving from various informational iterations that are often getting degraded as they as they kind of like recap each other and get compressed more and more. And so we are getting all of these voices, but basically we're receiving ultimate emptiness.

48:49Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, it's too much input. This is something I feel regularly. Vincent, are you feeling stupider than you used to?

48:57Alexandra Schwartz:No, but I do feel that there are many hurdles set up to staying as smart as you want. You know, you feel the drag, you know, if you want to put yourself into a book, you feel the many other things talking at you. If you want to, to your point about AI summaries, Nomi, if you want to Google something real fast, you get the stupid AI summary first. And you have to train yourself to just like let your eyes not cling to any one of those words and instead go find an actual source. Especially since they're so often wrong. Yeah, I feel the weight of all of that effort to stay smart, it seems. And whatever smart is, right?

49:43Alexandra Schwartz:I mean, I keep going back to this question of what is it that we think of as smart? What is it that our culture exalts and also casts aside IQ, for example, we cited IQ is famously problematic. It corresponds with all kinds of whatever, frankly, eugenic ideas, etc. But whatever it is to be smart, I'm doing this like sisyphean thing of continuing to kind of push it up the hill and the rock feels heavy.

50:13Vinson Cunningham:That's good. The rock should feel heavy. I mean, I think that's good. Because if the rock doesn't feel heavy, you're either in denial or you're up in your tower looking down, not even looking down. And that's not fun. You have to stay sharp.

50:32Alexandra Schwartz:Right, right. The question is, does the society support your contest with Therac, or is it so-called friction maxing? Is it actually, is every other current in the culture going against this pursuit?

50:50Naomi Fry:Yeah, it certainly does not support it.

50:52Alexandra Schwartz:It should always feel heavy, but the question is, is the society a wind at your back or going in the opposite direction? Okay. Well, before we leave, what does stupidity in your life do for you? What are the benefits of stupidity in the lives of the critics?

51:12Naomi Fry:Humor. Yeah, humor. Absolutely. For sure. Yeah.

51:16Vinson Cunningham:There's nothing better than stupid humor.

51:18Naomi Fry:Yes. When it hits, it hits. Oh, God. I would like to recommend something. Oh, good. The new Naked Gun movie that came out last year. Did you like it? I loved it. What a recommendation. Oh, my God. You guys, it's so funny. I'm telling you, it's the funniest movie I've seen in like the last, I don't know, five years maybe. And what makes it stupid? Oh, that's awesome. Oh, it's so stupid. It's like the classic slapstick kind of 80s airplane type, you know, Zucker, Abrams, Zucker movies. Like, stupidest humor. Incredibly funny. incredibly funny. Go see it. Love that.

52:03Alexandra Schwartz:You heard it here first, folks.

52:04Naomi Fry:Well, I don't know, first, but yes. Many, many months later. Stay funny. Stay funny.

52:10Alexandra Schwartz:Stay funny with the stupid.

52:20Alexandra Schwartz:This has been Critics at Large. Special thanks to James Tooley at the Sun Valley Writers Conference for helping us out this week. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentina. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman, and we had engineering help today from Pram Dandy with music by Alexis Quadrato. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com slash critics.

53:03Vinson Cunningham:Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm John Ross. And we're the hosts of Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. And just because the Oscars are done, for now, doesn't mean we are. Join us every week for coverage of the biggest stories in Hollywood, interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more.

53:23Naomi Fry:Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

53:33Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham.

53:34Vinson Cunningham:I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

53:39Alexandra Schwartz:Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy brain with it.

53:48Vinson Cunningham:Right. We take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

54:01Naomi Fry:We go highbrow. We go lowbrow. We go everything in between.

54:05Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture. Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

54:10Naomi Fry:K-pop to the Kennedys. From horror movies to heated rivalry.

54:13Vinson Cunningham:From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights. Great expectations to Desperate Housewives.

54:19Alexandra Schwartz:That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun.

54:22Naomi Fry:It's Critics Alarge from The New Yorker, every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

54:52Alexandra Schwartz:Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.