Rogers wired it as one of his daily squibs for the McNaught Syndicate, datelined Los Angeles, 22 November 1932; it ran on page one of papers dated 23 November 1932 under the standing head “Will Rogers Says.” The popular wording is verbatim on the scanned front page of The Washington Times ↗ — what has gone missing since is the opening words “in America” and the closing punchline, “It used to be vice versa.”
“People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke” Will Rogers, daily syndicated column (McNaught Syndicate), filed from Los Angeles 22 November 1932 (dateline per the Imperial Valley Press printing); printed in The Washington Times, 23 November 1932, page 1. · Verbatim: “Everything is changing in America. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke. It used to be vice versa.”
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Provenance
Page one, 23 November 1932
Work
“Will Rogers Says” — his daily syndicated column
Datelined
Los Angeles, 22 November 1932 — the dateline as set by the Imperial Valley Press printing, not by the Washington Times page read below
First printed
Newspapers dated 23 November 1932 (McNaught Syndicate)
Read from
The Washington Times, 23 Nov 1932, page 1 — Library of Congress scan
I thought he was crazy. He was—by two States. Everything is changing in America. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke. It used to be vice versa.
1932 · Page one
Transcribed from the scanned front page of The Washington Times ↗ of 23 November 1932. The lines just before it are Rogers owning up to a bad call of his own: Arthur Brisbane had bet Mrs. Ned McClain, on Rogers’s porch, that the Republicans would not carry eight states, and Rogers thought that was crazy — Hoover carried six. The column ran in the weeks after the 1932 presidential election.
22 November 1932 — Rogers wires the day’s squib to the McNaught Syndicate. The Imperial Valley Press ↗ of El Centro, California prints it datelined “Los Angeles, Nov. 22 (Special),” and the Will Rogers Memorial Museum ↗ dates the item 22 November 1932.
23 November 1932 — It runs on page one of The Washington Times ↗ under “WILL ROGERS Says:” with the notice “Copyright, 1932, by McNaught Syndicate”: “Everything is changing in America. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke. It used to be vice versa.”
1976 and 1980 — Quote Investigator ↗ documents the drift: a 15 April 1976 Boston Globe reprint deletes “in America,” and both that reprint and The Will Rogers Scrapbook (1980), edited by Bryan B. Sterling, read “the politicians” where the 1932 papers read “their politicians.”
2019 — The historian Ron Chernow revives the quip at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner; the enquiry that followed is what sent Quote Investigator ↗ back to the 1932 originals.
The line was first published in November 1932 under the notice “Copyright, 1932, by McNaught Syndicate,” legible at the foot of the scanned Washington Times column ↗. That is past the cut-off for automatic US public domain, and we have not confirmed whether the syndicate’s 1932 copyright was renewed, so quotle.info treats the column as in copyright and quotes only the short passage above. Rogers’s columns are published today by the Will Rogers Memorial Museum ↗.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
The words got trimmed, not stolen
Nobody else is seriously credited with this line — the attribution is solid. What has gone wrong is the text. The version that circulates is a shortened, slightly re-cut Rogers, and it almost never carries a date.
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OpeningThe missing words “in America” trimmed
Rogers wrote “Everything is changing in America.” Quote Investigator ↗ found “in America” already deleted when US newspapers reprinted the item on 15 April 1976.
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Wording“the politicians” for “their politicians” re-cut
Both 1932 front pages read “their politicians as a joke.” The 1976 reprint and The Will Rogers Scrapbook (1980) read “the politicians,” per Quote Investigator ↗, and the aggregators inherited that reading — A-Z Quotes ↗ still prints it that way, as does the museum’s own list.
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Punchline“It used to be vice versa” dropped
The whole joke is the reversal, and it is the first thing memes cut. It is right there at the end of the paragraph on page one of The Washington Times ↗ of 23 November 1932.
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SourcingQuoted with no date at all undated
A-Z Quotes ↗ gives no date, citing only a 1988 reprint of the Scrapbook, and the line does not appear among the sourced quotations collected on Wikiquote ↗. That is why a firmly dated 1932 newspaper squib reads to many people like an unverifiable internet saying.
✓Rogers really wrote it, and the date is nailed down: a daily squib for the McNaught Syndicate, datelined Los Angeles 22 November 1932 and printed on page one in papers dated 23 November 1932 — “Everything is changing in America. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke. It used to be vice versa.” (The Washington Times ↗; origin traced by Quote Investigator ↗.)
Context
Why he said it
Rogers filed this one in the weeks after the 1932 presidential election, and the column around it is all election talk. He preens a little that Walter Lippmann had actually read something he wrote about debts, then owns up to a call he got wrong: Arthur Brisbane had bet Mrs. Ned McClain, on Rogers’s porch, that the Republicans would not carry eight states, Rogers thought he was crazy, and Hoover came in with six — Brisbane right, by two states. Then he lands the line. Read in place, it is not a complaint about comedians at all. It is a complaint about a political class that had run out of credibility in the depths of the Depression.
That is why it keeps coming back. It was quoted at the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner by a historian rather than a comedian, which is roughly Rogers’s point running in reverse. And the irony was already his own job description: his columns ran in more than five hundred newspapers ↗, and he was, professionally, a rope-twirling comedian.
People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke. It used to be vice versa.
The same telegram, punctuated differently in different composing rooms
Even on day one the wording was not fixed. The scan of The Washington Times ↗ sets the tail as its own sentence — “as a joke. It used to be vice versa.” The Imperial Valley Press ↗ ran the same telegram the same morning with the tail attached as a clause, which is also how Quote Investigator ↗ transcribes the Ohio printing it cites: “as a joke, when-it-used-to-be-vice-versa.” One telegram, three composing rooms, three slightly different sentences.
Rogers was not moonlighting as a pundit. Per the Oklahoma Historical Society ↗, he wrote a weekly column from 1922 and a brief daily “telegram” after 1926, both syndicated nationally to more than five hundred papers. This squib ran on page one of the Washington Times, set beside the day’s wire story on the appointment to the Senate seat left vacant by the late Senator Wesley L. Jones — not tucked away on a features page.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1879–1935 · American humorist, film actor and syndicated columnist
Born in 1879 as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory — now Oklahoma — Will Rogers turned a vaudeville rope act into the most trusted running commentary in America. From 1922 he wrote a weekly column and from 1926 a brief daily telegram, both syndicated to more than five hundred newspapers, filed in the voice of a man who insisted all I know is just what I read in the papers. He was killed with the pilot Wiley Post when their plane went down in Alaska on 15 August 1935.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Will Rogers, “Will Rogers Says,” daily syndicated column, McNaught Syndicate, filed 22 November 1932 (dateline “Los Angeles, Nov. 22” per the Imperial Valley Press, El Centro, Calif., November 23, 1932, p. 1); printed in The Washington Times (Washington, DC), November 23, 1932, p. 1. Origin traced in “Quote Origin: People Are Taking Their Comedians Seriously, and Their Politicians as a Joke,” Quote Investigator, April 30, 2019.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as a joke’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/people-are-taking-their-comedians-seriously-and-their/