Will Rogers' lessons for political smarts – and healthy skepticism

When was the last time you laughed about politics?

Will Rogers wrote and spoke about politics and politicians with humor and a degree of skepticism that manifested itself not as vitriol but as wry observation. I wish I had his skill when I was covering the Maine State House − it would have been so much fun to be able to say, as he did, “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”

Historian Steven Watts just published a new biography of Rogers, who lived from 1879 to 1935. Watts writes in a story for us this week that the Oklahoma-born Rogers “had risen to fame as a cowboy humorist in vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway shows and silent movies, and he earned public acclaim with his shrewd, folksy and witty observations on American life and values.”

Watts relates some of Rogers’ funniest – and wisest – lines from a career that also included writing a syndicated column in the 1920s for over 300 newspapers in which he “gleefully skewered the ‘bunk’ of American politics, his favorite word for politicians’ shameless hypocrisy, bombastic rhetoric, inflated egos and shady deal-making.” But Rogers didn’t write only about politicians and their world. He also wrote about regular Americans, whose judgment he trusted: The average citizen, Rogers believed, “was not simple minded enough to believe that EVERYTHING is right and doesn’t appear to be cuckoo enough to believe that EVERYTHING is wrong.”

This week we also liked stories about the malleability of people’s personality, a new video game based on a 16th-century Chinese novel, and preserving photos in the digital age.

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