YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexandra Petri

lines on the record: 103
first: 2018-01-24
most recent: 2018-01-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You don't want to go there every week. Yeah, yeah. But you have to turn on the television, there's only one channel, and it's just like George Papadopoulos or that wonderful gentleman who arrived for 10 days and then vanished. Oh, that's guy.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the extent that Donald Trump has been playing himself on television since before I was born. And when somebody's already sort of flattened in certain dimensions so that you appear more realistic on television, it's harder to really add anything by just doing like a straight-up parody of somebody like that. He's a better Trump impersonator than any Trump impersonator will ever be. I do like the sort of cast of characters that have... Assembled around him”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but you're ruining my joke now. And then Ariana was when I wrote a very eviscerating column about her, she called up and I thought she was going to yell at me. And I was like, I don't want to hear it, Ariana. And she goes, oh, one of your, I'm not going to do her accent. She goes, you have a grammatical error in the third paragraph. I thought you'd like.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chart for that you laugh I thought that was great about the board of Twitter. He thought it was funny. That was a good joke. Come on. No, it got to the point where we even had two, there were two of them were Peter C, Peter Chernin and Peter Curry. That was the whole problem. Yeah, but Jeroen.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, yeah. It was a separate chart for that. You laughed at my three Peters and a dick joke. I thought that was great about the board of Twitter. That was a good joke. Come on. No, it's a good idea.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Megan and I were a couple years ago working on Silicon Valley, I say Megan and I like it was our show. We were in the room together. I remember at one point I asked just the folks in the register room, what is it as you've been back and forth up to Silicon Valley that strikes you as funny, that strikes you as just odd. And they all immediately said, oh, listen, man, it doesn't matter what company you're talking to. They all say, you know, we're changing the world. We're making the world a better place. And these guys in the writers room were like, you know the guys next door say that and the guys upstairs say that and the guys downstairs who are pouring virtual mustaches on people also say that um there's just a lot of that here”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're doing very seriously, but Seriously. Right. You know, it's sort of a similar thing. The only person who actually would laugh at things, two people, Dick, in Silicon Valley, it's you and Arianna Huffington, pretty much, that laugh at themselves. Everyone else that we make jokes about are really hard on really getting. Why'd you say that about?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think some people have senses of humor, and other people become enraged. And it really varies by the person and the thing you're writing about. But people do take themselves very seriously and what they're doing very seriously. But some people don't take one of those things seriously.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. No, well, one time I got something from someone had told, like, Newt Gingrich had told a fellow reporter, and he actually enjoyed the piece. It was like Donald Trump turning into a bat. And he was like, hey, not bad.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So to finish up this section, so you just write it, it goes in, and that's it. That's it. And if someone, have you gotten complaints from people that don't like being made fun of? I mean, do you find Washington's not the most?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're in the quarterfinals. Three of those 20 are DC. I mean, loosely speaking, like Montgomery County and also Northern Virginia and also DC. Three separate places that don't share any resources.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I am. I'm literally writing about the headquarters. Oh, good. It's mostly just me realizing that I don't have a lot of information about what makes for a good headquarters.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could be like Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, also owns the post. So you have to do this little disclaimery thing, but then I can just be like, whatever. It's comic.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. My favorite thing is now he's on every award show. There's a certain point during every award show when the camera just pans over and there's Jeff Bezos. And I'm like, oh, because Amazon also makes everything.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I sort of have my own sense of what's off limits, but no one's ever come down on me and been like, how dare you, et cetera? And like, we don't do this here.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think for the most part they've been very good about letting me cover things. I think one time I tried to write a piece about Liberacci that had no basis in the news, but that was years ago. And they were like, why are you writing about Liberace? I'm like, because Liberace is great. That was not what the day called for.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But usually just one emerges. One emerges a day. Or some days three emerge, and the previous day nothing emerged because I was typing in three windows like some sort of weird specific rim character.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it'll go up, and then I'll be looking around and something else will have arisen. And so every day there's like 18 things I want to be writing.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have an editor and I'll send it in, and then they'll sort of say, usually I will write like double the column that I need to have written, and I'll put some brackets around it, being like, this paragraph is probably not necessary. Tell me if you like this joke, and then we'll go back and forth on it. And then when it's okay, they'll check it and make certain all my links go to actual pages and not to weird non-pages. Yeah. Whitehouse.com. Remember Whitehouse.com? I do. I remember”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have been so far over the Unless it's President Kardashian. So I want to get the present, and then I do want to talk about Trump pretty much the whole time. So you sit down, you pick the topic, it's often Trump. At this point, it's often or something like that. And then how do you decide to do it? And who edits these things?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like after Trump is no longer president, we just won't be able to get enraged about anything anymore. Everything else will be like, oh, it seems that's fine. Know it'll be like it'll be the next person won't be able to do anything that will like make people go, that's insane. We'll just be, it'll be so far over the edge.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's mostly politics because that's sort of the DC of it is that I'm the sort of person who, if left untended, would still read articles about Ted Cruz and what he's up to and how he's feeling. And I feel like that sort of sets DC apart from the rest of the population. People here are genuinely excited that C-SPAN's on the radio. You're driving along. You're like, oh boy, C-SPAN radio. I'm at home. And so I think that feeling of like, this is what I'm watching and this is what I'm nerding out about. Then, also, this is how everything is going horribly wrong, and those things combine.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I love how it's like, oh, is where all the journalists are making jokes to one another about the news that's happened? Because usually you'll find out about breaking news event because someone will have made a joke referencing that event open weekly. And somebody was joking, I forget who on Twitter, like when a meteor comes, eventually they'll just say, oh, can't wait for that big rock to hit us all. Yeah, right, exactly. Finally, something the rock won't be loved in. And you're like, oh, it's because a meteor's coming. And you can reverse engineer it from the joke. So I will just be reading or watching the news.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly, I'll read the news. I sort of constantly have Twitter open, which is terrible for my sort of, I mean, I love Twitter. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be like, ah, Twitter, it's terrible for my general feelings and opinions. That's okay. You can tell.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't do all the bird The osteon at sea level. Dick does better at sea level. So walk us through your process of doing this. Whatever you feel like writing, you just pick a topic or how do you think about it?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say they think a lot of themselves there and they work, they all wear suits. There's very serious stone. It's very, we're doing the important work. It's like the Davos of Washington. We are doing the Davos of Davos of the country, you mean. Yes, I'm kidding. Dick, why are you?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah No, you don't need to watch the whole show. You just need to know here's like the three takeaway lines and also what the writer thought about the through line.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of doing a recap on the page of what was going on. One of the things I love most about watching regular television is after you've watched it, you can go and sit down and read on Vulture or somewhere what someone else who watched it thought of it. I feel like getting to do that for the debates and things like that was sort of how. A lot of people discovered me, it was a lot of fun to do.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because people started reading it, and that was nice to see and also made them feel like, oh, maybe people want to hear this sort of thing. And then, especially during the election, it...”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, no, like literally every day or so we're just like texting back puns to one another be like, hey, I thought of a pun for you and they're bad, but they're plentiful. And so then we went on to write the hasty pudding show, which is another pun rich drag musical. So we did that for two years. And so it's just like, it'll be easier if we just live together so I can come and knock on your door and throw puns at you. Which was nice because I was never like, oh, are women funny? I'm like, only women are very funny, but we're”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For freshman only, yeah. So we discovered we had a mutual affection for puns that bordered on sort of torture to those around us. Vegan is very...”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not an odd coincidence since you are both like Freshman year, we both wrote the, we co wrote the freshman musical because they had a lot of opportunities to write musical”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, how did you end up being roommates? Because that's sort of an odd coincidence that you and Megan ended up rooming together, or not an odd coincidence since you were both like, you're doing this, I'm doing this.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, no, she's the biggest typist. She gave us all unreasonable expectations of what would happen, which was you would graduate from college, people would instantly recognize your immense merit, and suddenly you would be a wildly successful comedy writer beloved by all. All right, where's your...”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, is it hard to write comedy about that? It's interesting because I think about everyone does joke. I was talking to a bunch of people actually in Europe, oddly enough just recently, just yesterday. And they were like, it's not funny, Kara. And I was like, well, it's a little funny. It's slightly funny. And at the same time, I realized they're absolutely correct. It's not funny, that kind of stuff. So why don't you talk about your process of how you do this and writing? Dick, have you written, have you done columns?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like there's a lot of humor in situations where you just need to, you know you're going to see something awful every day and you just have to cope with it in some way. I've never been a surgeon, but I assume they're constantly joking with one another to keep their spirits up. I feel like it's similar where because every day the news is so dire and every day you hear, oh 24 year old has just pushed some people down the stairs in wheelchairs and also Donald Trump has like six hamburgers in every hand. This weird cocktail of absurdity. And so you have to remember this is wild. This is happening every day, but it's still completely not a thing that should be happening. And sometimes jokes can be useful for getting through that by just like making eye contact across the room with someone and saying, oh, are you seeing this? I'm seeing this. This is not...”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. Yeah, well, that's comedy. So talk a little bit about sort of the atmosphere right now in Washington. It just yields yourself. Like you were saying that that's a really good point. It's like, this is such heavy comedic. You know, Dick, I think you've talked that about this is such a heavy comedic time and so dire at the same time. Yeah.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was an intern. I just had a drug policy or something like that. He was 22 years old. That story you guys are writing about the 24-year-old who's running the Office of Drug Policy is disturbing in the extreme. You can't even joke about it. It's really, that's...”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They saw this positive headline, I think, and assumed it was one of those things where if you'd read the second sentence, you would have. Probably not shared it. Yeah”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“White House sent out one of my pieces in their official morning newsletter last January or during the first time that his sort of tax idea bill came up. They were like, I had written this piece saying it will fix everything that's wrong with the economy by punching it in the face. And they were like, the Washington Post loves our new plan. Oh, no, really.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's always this one column where you're like halfway through, and you're like, Oh, this person making a familiar case is actually making it as a joke, which is a problem you do have, especially doing satire type things as opposed to more obviously, like, here are some jokes about the States and why they're funny places to be. You'll get, I think... And they may dispute this, but I was on the radio recently, and I had written this what I thought was relatively clearly a satirical piece, and they were like, so you made this case. And I'm like, oh, I don't think I made that case. I thought I made the opposite of that case. But you will run into the problem where people will think you're not joking. Oh, that's not good. And the Trump.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a blog most of the time, but every weekend it transforms into like pumpkin like into a column on the print page. But now I'm actually syndicated. So tell newspapers if they want me, they can have me. Oh, I see. She's using jazz hands. Jazz hands are, like, just assume I'm doing jazz hands unless proven otherwise, basically.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I mean, as Will Rogers said, we can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by. Right, that's true.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They did though. It's like, well, how hard can it be to write a good blog? And Esther Klein was like, actually, somewhat difficult. Esra's not funny. It requires this recline.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, basically, I kept whenever I wrote stuff under my own name, it would have jokes in it. I would keep trying to sneak jokes into the editorials and they would be like, we don't really need a pun here. We often need puns, but not here, not now. But they didn't try to stifle me. At first, I shared a column with Dana Millbank because they were like, You both write jokes. Maybe you should have a blog together. So it was funny because he had this blog called Like Rough Sketch. And so they had a giant picture, like a regular picture of his head. And then there would just be stuff that I'd written underneath this large picture of Dana Millbag's head. And all the comments would be like, Dana, why are you writing from the perspective of a 23-year-old woman? He'd be like, this isn't ideal for either of us, I feel. So eventually we sort of...”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's in the movie, the post. The woman plays her really well, actually, but she was not the funniest person, as I recall, working there. So you did that. And then how did you get to the column? Well, basically.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started off as an intern for the opinion section for the editorials. I got to write very serious, I do all this reporting about things like should we have a stop sign here and what's going on with net neutrality back in the day? This was the internet.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like at a certain point, you're desensitized to it. Like, if you spend your whole day making shellfish and someone gives you a good shellfish, you're not going to be like, wow, best thing I've ever tasted. I enjoy this. You're just like, I'm around these all day. They're slimy. They're disgusting. But I approve of what you've done here. So how did you get?”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although it's second city, whenever people who were performers would watch a show and something was funny, we just kind of look at each other and go, that's funny. You know, when you're doing it, you would see something on stage and everyone else is laughing. And the people who would also perform would just nod and go, that was funny.”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, he's not so much like topical humor as just humor in general. Whereas like, I grew up in Columbus and everything was terrible. And my grandfather was a Civil War veteran and he thought the war was still going on. But I just grew up reading a lot of people who were really funny on the page. That, I guess, kind of came out when I started writing myself. How do I, in the space of 750 words, make jokes that hopefully people will audibly laugh at instead of sort of looking at them and going, hmph, which is also a valid response to”
2018-01-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Alexandra Petri, columnist, the Washington Post · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT