Olbermann to Esquire Magazine: 'I’ve Never Fought the Word Genius' Applied to Me

January 18th, 2014 11:32 PM

On the cover of the latest Esquire magazine is this quote from ESPN  host Keith Olbermann: "I’ve never fought the word genius when people have said that about me." In a "What I've Learned" interview, Olbermann added, "But what it is is instinct and a set of skills that are working so fast you don’t know they’re working."

Keith also declared "I have a leafy brain, according to the theory of the leafy brain. I associate things that many people never put together." This sounds like someone's brain on leaves...and a lighter.


He is always the adult in the room, and there is no one dumber than television executives, who have just never figured out how the word genius applies to him: "Don’t assume that anybody above you actually knows what they’re doing. And if you find somebody who does, stick to them like glue. Because the further you go into your career, the more you will discover to your absolute horror that you are the adult."

In this "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey" narrative, Olbermann actually suggests that he has great control over his anger:

Your anger will cool into hardened passionate insight if you wait a day. Most of the things that make me angry, I try to let them sit. The heat that remains will be sufficient. The stuff that evaporates is the stuff that would have simply offended or made it histrionic.

And who has EVER accused Keith Olbermann of being histrionic? Or offensive? Or histrionically offensive?

We've largely avoided commenting on Olbermann since he hasn't been really political since his return to sports talk, but there is this one liberal utterance to Esquire:

I ran into somebody I knew since the seventies who had to sell his house because his daughter had Lyme disease and the insurance had run out. That’s an absolute failure of society.