Get off the couch....

How Tim Walz Got So Savage

J.D. Vance should be afraid—because this guy used to teach high school.

By Evan McGarvey

New Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz’s decency and mensch status have rung out over the past few days. Protector of IVF. Supporter of queer teens. Champion of feeding all schoolkids. Thrower of precise first pitches. Beloved and superb public high school teacher.

But there is a specific kind of needle underneath his patina of ice fishing and state fair ardor. In the clip you’ve surely seen by now, Walz clowned VC errand boy and womb zealot J.D. Vance.

The clip’s now-memed line is worthy of close reading: “I gotta tell ya, I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up!”

The opening is sepia-toned Great Lakes. “I gotta tell ya” signals that we are about to receive the kind of diss track unexpected at a gathering of Lutherans and hot dish. Then real enthusiasm (“can’t wait to debate!”). Then turning Vance fungible (“the guy”). Then the knife to the ribs: “if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” This succeeds twofold: summoning the unfounded rumor that the junior senator from Ohio sought the girlfriend experience from a sectional and recalling the cowardice (“show up”) of a man who struggles to defend his wife from racist attacks and now serves a man he once compared to Hitler.

It’s a masterclass of Midwestern prosody that cannot be taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Many have said and written that Walz has “great comic timing.” But the skill isn’t congenital—it’s professional. It’s the skill of a teacher.

It’s a secret of the profession: Witness bowling-alley faculty happy hours in which the fiftysomething science teacher delivers a scorching five minutes on the evangelical family whose dad surfs OnlyFans in the carpool lane. Hear your trusted, overburdened administrator go off on how she got the title “dean” but no pay bump, nor shielding from fire-breathing parents, and weave a monologue about contemporary bullshit worthy of Pynchon. Talent agents of America, get off TikTok and forsake the NYU–to–Echo Park pipeline. Scour the nation’s “Meet the teachers!” nights for your next comedy star.

There’s a reason they’re so good. Like other artists, most teachers are skilled humanists who have eschewed a lucrative career for intellectual freedom. But other artists—even pre–social media stand-ups who had to perform in front of actual people in clubs—do not have to weather the audience that teachers do: teenagers.

The true rite of passage for a teacher isn’t bureaucracy or textbooks that call Jefferson Davis “complicated” or the withering of a generation’s attention span. The test is having young people at their most charmingly venomous stage savage your appearance, your voice, your vocabulary, and your habits. To survive, you can either become the humorless disciplinarian that they hate (the J.D. Vance type), or you can play along with them, roast yourself a bit, and then, when for the third time that week a boy reminds the entire class of the time when you forgot to wear a belt, you can laugh along with the joke, pause for a moment, and gently clap back with something like, “Yeah, it’s kind of like the time you forgot that Gatsby’s first name isn’t actually The Great.”

Walz nails the self-deprecation element. He never hesitates to refer to himself as an old white guy. He apparently told Kamala Harris’ team that he needs coaching on how to use a teleprompter. Crucially, it’s clear that his students trusted him—and that they were high school students. An early childhood teacher who jokes back needs to be sent to The Hague. Remember when Trump teased the 7-year-old who believed in Santa?

At the beginning of my teaching career in the 2010s, when I was only a decade older than my students, I made a deal with them: If they didn’t do their work, I would ruin a contemporary catchphrase. It worked. After I said that John Donne’s ability to blend human desires with religious duty was “on fleek,” no one turned in an essay late again. It’s become my signature move, my aged millennial version of George Carlin’s withering media critiques.

“Weird” appears to be Walz’s idiosyncratic touch. It’s perfect: a timeless insult that skewers thoughts and actions without giving them the power of a badass word like “abhorrent” or “dangerous.”