One day, when I’m old and gray, I plan to sit my grandchildren on my knee and explain how meme culture went from photos of cats in lab coats to neon gifs of Russian President Vladimir Putin riding shirtless on a horse plastered with comic sans word art.
Not many know this change better than Alexandra Petri, the mind behind The Washington Post’s Compost blog. I sat down with her recently at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where she spoke about satire in the age of President Donald Trump.
Petri’s column features titles such as “How Paul Manafort came by $934,350 in antique carpets,” “I’d love to be able to look my grandkids in the eye, but if I do I’ll be primaried from the right,” and “Famous quotes, the way a woman would have to say them during a meeting.”
Like Petri’s breadth of topics, our discussion bounced around from Abraham Lincoln’s fart jokes to comedy’s relationship with conservative voters to the future of journalism.
» MORE: Watch
Petri's lunchtime talk with fellows of the Shorenstein Center
at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, recorded by the WGBH Forum Network.
