Ben Stein
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Academia
Stein grew up in Washington D.C., a city with an extremely high dick quotient. He majored in economics at Columbia University’s Columbia College, from which he graduated with honors in 1966. He then went to Yale Law School, where he graduated as class valedictorian in 1970. He has taught at Washington’s American University, UC Santa Cruz, and Malibu’s Pepperdine University Law School. Stein is also the author of more than two dozen books and, astonishingly, was involved with one of the great TV shows of the 1970s, Norman Lear’s Fernwood 2-Night.
Given the extensiveness of these credentials, it’s all the more bizarre that he is currently one of the loudest voices – and one of the very rare Jews – championing the crackpot theory of intelligent design.
Nixon apologist
Stein’s father, the economist Herbert Stein, was a member of President Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors, which probably had nothing to do with Stein, not yet 30, getting a job as a speechwriter for Nixon, a dick so quintessential that his very name was Dick. When Nixon left office in utter disgrace in 1974, Stein was vociferous in his belief that the whole thing was much ado about nothing. On the tenth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Stein wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled “Was Watergate Really Such a Big Deal?” in which he put forth the theory that it really wasn’t. This argument was predicated on his interviews with his two female college student assistants whose response (“Watergate? What was that?”) led him directly to wonder, “Really, who now knows what Watergate was about? What was all the shouting about? If whatever Nixon did was so obscure that no one can even remember what he did any longer … how drastic could it have been? … If the nation chased a president out of office for the only time in 200 years and no one clearly remembers why, something went drastically wrong.” This is widely believed to be one of the most specious theories ever posited by an allegedly sentient human, so much so that even Stein himself had the sense to deny the Washington Post or Nexis the right to archive the article espousing it.
Entertainment career
“Acting”
Having, with one single column, thoroughly discredited himself as anyone to be taken seriously, Stein segued into the next phase of his career as an obnoxious motion picture and television presence. For his first movie role, he was required to stretch his nascent acting muscles by portraying a boring monotonic teacher in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (Stein has said that he would like to see his famous line, “Bueller? … Bueller?” on his gravestone, which from his point of view, would certainly be better than “craven Nixon apologist.”)
Stein also appeared in the films The Mask, Son of the Mask, Soapdish, Honeymoon in Vegas, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as well as the TV shows Seinfeld, Full House, MacGyver, Married … With Children, and The Mask: The Animated Series. In not one of these roles did Stein do anything other than essentially play his soporific, nasal-droning, nerdy self.
Hosting
In 1997 Comedy Central got into the Ben Stein business, giving him a game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money, which ran until 2003. In 1999 Stein won a Daytime Emmy as “Outstanding Game Show Host,” further confirming the essential meaningless of all such awards. That same year, he was given a talk show, the not-for-the-squeamishly titled Turn Ben Stein On. It lasted eight months. Stein is currently a co-host of the VH1 reality show, America’s Most Smartest Model.
Shilling
Stein has appeared in commercials for Nikon, Pan Am, Oldsmobile, Office Max, Western Union, IBM, Sterling Optical, Chips Ahoy, DirecTV, Godfather’s Pizza and Clear Eyes. The question of why anyone would think anyone would buy anything based on its endorsement by Ben Stein remains an unfathomable mystery.
Unhealthy obsession
Stein is the author of Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter, in which he unselfconsciously revealed – no, actually more like bragged about – his penchant for flirting with teen-age girls of above-average beauty and below-average intelligence. This subject has been further detailed in numerous other Stein-authored books and magazine articles.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Stein denounces the theory of evolution, which he insists on calling “Darwinism,” mainly because the American people have been conditioned to think that words ending in “-ism” are bad. His embrace of the theory of intelligent design – essentially a more respectable-sounding way of saying cretinism creationism – culminated in his 2008 film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. This documentary posits the notion that belief in “Darwinism” is step one on the road to genocide (and did, in fact, inspire the Holocaust). This premise is as rock solid as his hypothesis that because two ignorant college girls never heard of Watergate, therefore no one alive could remember what it was about.
Stein portrays supporters of intelligent design as victims of discrimination by the scientific community – the same snobbish scientific community that ignores those who believe the earth is flat. There is some evidence that Stein’s loopy beliefs about the origin of the species is causing many to lose respect for his views on the economy, about which he writes regularly in the New York Times. The Big Picture blog suggested that the phrase “tomfoolery” be replaced by “Ben Steinery.”
Trivia
- In the December 1987 issue of GQ magazine, Stein wrote an article (boldly using the pseudonym Bert Hacker) that claimed that comedian and dick Joan Rivers joked about her husband’s suicide. He and Rivers eventually settled her $50 million libel suit out of court.
- Stein was once detained for bringing a gun into Burbank Airport, though he explained that he was dazed and confused from the Halcion he’d taken the previous night.
- On January 11, 2002, Stein was one of four guests beamed in from different locations to CNN’s TalkBack Live. When fellow guest Arianna Huffington said something disparaging about him, Stein dickishly gave her the finger and walked off the set.
