Alexandra Petri Article Corker the Funny Version
Alexandra Petri grew up the overachieving only child of overachieving parents — her mother was a nonprofit executive and her father served as a congressman representing Wisconsin for 36 years. She went to Harvard to study English and found her voice writing plays and a column for student paper The Crimson, as well as performing standup comedy. After graduation in 2010, Petri became the youngest person to have her own column at t he Washington Post. Now 28, Petri writes the ComPost blog, as well as a weekly print column that digs into culture and politics with a heavy dose of satire. Here, she explains how she's spent her whole life finding the funny in everyday situations.
Plays are some of the first types of things I was reading and writing, and Shakespeare was my first obsession. In high school, I had the chance to enter a young playwright's competition through Arena Stage, which is a regional theater company in Washington, D.C. They picked 10 plays to be performed and they chose three of mine. My first play was about two unicorns waiting for Noah's Ark, which had just left. It was me trying to do Waiting for Godot, but with unicorns. I got to hang out at rehearsals, and it felt magical that really talented people were bringing to life the words that I wrote.
Standup comedy was my weird hobby. I would drag my poor parents out to the only open mics that were in coffee shops instead of bars. I'd get up and go, "Hi, I'm 17 and I have jokes about matriculation!" At the time I was like, Why is no one laughing?
After high school graduation, I took the tests that show you what math classes you should take and it suggested I should major in it, so of course I thought I was a genius at math. At Harvard, I signed up for a rigorous proof-based linear algebra class and within two weeks, I didn't understand what was going on. I went to my first exam with a huge sandwich, looked at the exam, drew a sad face on the exam, and went back to eating the sandwich very loudly. I barely passed it, largely because my roommates were taking it too. After that, I decided to be an English major with a concentration in classics, which is like a minor, but it's called "a concentration in a secondary field" at Harvard because people who go to Harvard are always trying to be as toolish as possible.
My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before and needless to say I quickly lost control of the class. I ended up spending every session showing YouTube videos of comedians like Dane Cook and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. On evaluation day, I gave them all some cake and said, "Please don't tell my boss what went on here."
I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for On Harvard Time, which was a student TV show trying to be The Daily Show. And I wrote a humor column for The Crimson starting my sophomore year. My column was called Petri Dishes. It was mostly about school and current affairs. Every now and then, when I want to cringe with my whole body, I'll look at the archives on the internet. I once wrote that Hillary Clinton isn't funny because women aren't funny. I look at that now and twitch convulsively and melt into the earth.
I was also in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which is America's oldest collegiate theater troupe, with an all-male cast. I joined the tech crew my freshman year because I knew how to sew. My junior year, I became part of the first team of women to write a show for the Pudding with my roommate Megan Amram. She's gone on to write for Parks and Recreation and Silicon Valley, and became America's Twitter darling. We were like, "Yay, we're feminist pioneers!" One of the shows was called Commie Dearest, another was Acropolis Now based in Ancient Greece. I put my classics degree to work writing puns.
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All of my activities were all pretty dude-heavy. Back then, I was super excited to be in a roomful of guys. The one thing I wish I could go back and tell younger me is that if you're in a room of all guys, it doesn't mean there's something special about you. It means there's something wrong with the room.
The summer before my senior year, I interned at The Washington Post in the opinion section. I had grown up reading the Post and was a voracious newspaper reader, especially Garfield. I was the only intern in the department and they actually let me write unassigned editorials. I started covering technology because it was up for grabs and I felt, as a Millennial, I had a stake in making a coherent position in that area. I learned about all these niche areas, like what should we do about cyber wars and hacking?
I graduated in 2010 and went back to the Post for another internship that summer. I had applied for a grant to study Renaissance poetry at Oxford. But by the end of the summer, the Post said, "You could just stay here and we'll extend your contract." I thought maybe I could defer going to Oxford, but they would only defer if you were gravely ill or a member of your family was dying. I sent them an email saying, "I consider print media a member of my family and I see it getting skinnier and skinnier as newspapers are folding." I was hoping they would enjoy the joke, but I got a very terse email back saying, "We see that you've declined our offer." I was like, All right, journalism it is!
I started as a full-time writer in the opinion section, contributing to the PostPartisan blog and occasionally writing for Dana Milbank's blog called Rough Sketch. They kept changing the graphic on the blog — first it was his big head, then the two of our heads. In 2012, we changed the name to ComPost and it became my blog.
My joke is that my beat is "What's the internet upset about today?" At first, it was hard to justify why I was picking topics. This was back in the day when the way we figured out how to get traffic was to look at what everyone was Googling.
One of my favorite columns was what I call "Woman in a Meeting" [written in October 2015, which describes how women have to overexplain and apologize for their emotions]. I got an email from Sheryl Sandberg saying, "Hey, I read your column and I agree with everything you're saying." I also heard from regular people, like women working in sciences who say people ask them to put more exclamation points in their emails all the time. Whenever you write something that strikes a chord, that to me is super rewarding.
Writing about the election in 2012 was a lot of fun and a nice warm-up in terms of having half as many candidates to juggle, and a few fun characters like Rick Santorum and his perpetual sweater vests. I even got to tour Tampa's scenic and numerous strip clubs.
When I started writing about [this year's] presidential debates, it was like candy to me. At first I started writing a typical "here's what I think about what just happened" piece. Then I started doing translation recaps and people started responding. There are so many incredibly intelligent people writing a straightforward take [on politics]. I was trying to figure out what I had to add. My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far no one has.
A favorite of mine is the one where I wrote about Chris Christie screaming wordlessly. That one really took off. The more I went out on weirder limbs with the campaign coverage, the more response I would get. It gave me the courage to write about, say, Ted Cruz's asexual reproduction.
I'll sometimes use Twitter as a way to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I'll tweet 50 jokes and if a few get a lot of comments, I'll use them for a column. I think Chris Christie's eyes emerged from a whole bunch of Twitter jokes.
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I've been lucky enough that I haven't gotten many negative comments, considering how many women on the internet get bile thrown at them every day. Sometimes I'll get emails that say, "You're dumb. Your columns should be used to line my parakeet's cage." And I'll write back, "Thank you for subscribing to the Washington Post!"
I think it's harder to cover Trump now. How do you parody someone who takes a lot of the traditional tools of parody — exaggeration, making something look absolutely crazy — and uses them himself? Trump is so invested in being the extreme version of himself that it's definitely a challenge. So I'll have to take another way in. I try to read and consume as much content that isn't news as possible. That will often be what triggers an idea. Like, maybe I can do a Beckett parody?
The internet is this amazing space that shows that you can say your weirdest, truest thing that is most personal — that thing that maybe zero people will get — but maybe nine people will get and it will be their favorite thing ever. So I just try to be nine people's favorite thing rather than 100 people's ninth favorite thing.
I have a giant running list of things that might be column ideas in my phone. When there's a lot of news, you have to write about it. But sometimes there are dead zones, so I'll pitch a column on voice mails or Police Academy. Sometimes I know what I should be writing but I just can't figure out how to say it. That's much more common than not having any idea. After the election, I would love to do a column where I just go to every event I'm invited to on Facebook and see how my life changes.
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When there isn't something funny to say, the trick is to recognize those times and not try too hard. Sometimes all you have to do is straightforwardly describe what is happening and what people are saying and people will say, "That was a great humor column you did!" even if I'm just exactly recounting events. Everything these days is running a razor's edge between hilariously hilarious and hilariously tragic. It's hard to figure out what side you're going to flop on each day.
I have a literary agent who represents me for my columns and she said, "If you have a nonfiction book in you, that would be stupendous." She said I should write a Millennial manifesto and I was like, I don't want to do that. So I wrote about this collection of experiences I've had, like competing in a whistling competition and taking part in the international pun community. They're not quite normal, and they're funny. But even if they're not that, they are at least true. I started working on the book in 2012, finished it in 2014-ish, and A Field Guide to Awkward Silences came out in 2015.
I don't do standup anymore, but I couldn't give up playwriting because it's a way of telling stories my brain just loves. I love connecting with a live audience and working with actors. I'm in a playwrights' collective in D.C. called The Welders. For the next couple of seasons, we're all helping produce and support each other's work, finding spaces for it, and getting an audience. I've had a couple of my plays produced in the Capital Fringe Festival, the Breadbox theater in San Francisco, Panndora's Box in Santa Ana, and Rorschach Theatre in D.C.
Right now I'm writing fan-fictiony stuff where you have characters in pop culture floating around different experiences. In a recent play, I sent all of Shakespeare's tragic heroines to summer camp where they could fix their lives. A side dream project would be to turn Shakespeare's tragic heroines into superheroes and give them amazing powers. After the election, I can go off into the woods and write this weird thing.
When you love doing stuff, you find the time. It'll be me on the train typing frantically, or waking up on Saturday and sitting in the coffee shop all day. That's pretty much my weekend. I like to joke that for relaxation from writing I sometimes write. My boyfriend is used to not seeing me for long periods of time. He just knows I'm writing in a hole somewhere.
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I was very lucky to fall into a day job that is so creatively fulfilling but is also still a day job. That's made a huge difference in terms of being able to pursue things creatively, but also if I don't have time to pursue something else, I can still be creative in this job.
I'm still at the phase where I don't want to let go of any of the balloons yet. I want to make sure I'm still treading water in all of these areas that I would love to see something more happen in. I want to write a fiction book and do something for TV. If there's any way to do the David Simon thing, where you still do your day job and also make TV, that would be ideal.
But I don't understand Hollywood at all. I'll go have a meeting with a charming man who is like, "I produced a movie back in the '80s!" and I'm like, "Great, let me tell you about my idea for a Star Wars rom-com." That's an actual dream project. I want to tell the stories of the side characters. I always feel like the guy just out of the frame being thrown to the Rancor pit has an interesting story to tell. Or the backup dancer in Jabba the Hutt's palace. What are her dreams and ambitions?
Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.
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Source: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/a63347/alexandra-petri-washington-post-get-that-life/
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