The figurative language of Andrew Marantz…

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I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphor from New Yorker scribe Andrew Marantz….

I like political satire as much as the next person, but American politics is so coo-coo right now that satire scarcely seems necessary. Still, I found a Nov. 20/17 New Yorker profile of political comedian Jordan Klepper (with whom I had been unfamiliar) interesting enough that it had me prowling YouTube to catch segments of Klepper’s show The Opposition.

The story headlined “Jordan Klepper’s Comic Conspiracy” and written by Andrew Marantz (pictured above), employed some fine descriptive writing, such as this portrait of Klepper:

another tall, coiffed white guy with a perennially cocked eyebrow.

But I especially enjoyed the metaphors Marantz made when introducing a secondary character, Alex Jones. Here’s what he said:

Jones, for anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock ceiling in a subterranean doomsday bunker, is America’s foremost conspiracy barker. (Or maybe I should modify that with “full-time,” to exclude such Twitter hobbyists as Louise Mensch and the President.) His show is taped at an undisclosed location in Austin, Texas. He sits at a wide desk covered with stacks of paper—articles printed out from the Internet—and, as he riffles through pages, he is sometimes filmed from above, his hands framed as if he were a concert pianist. (The camera doesn’t linger on the fine print, which Jones has a habit of misrepresenting.)

But here is my favourite Marantz metaphor, in which he made a meal of Alex Jones:

Jones treats facts the way cats treat small rodents, batting them around for a few minutes before butchering them for sport.

I always find figurative language that’s been buoyed by a sense of humour to be particularly appealing.

An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Dec. 7/17.

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