Public Biography
Dan Acrid is an American broadcast commentator, author, and the co-host of “Point/Counterpoint,” the long-running opinion segment on NBC’s Saturday Night Live Weekend Update. He has opened approximately 1,400 segments with the phrase “Jane, you ignorant slut,” and at no point in the intervening forty-seven years has anyone at the network asked him to stop.
Mr. Acrid holds a degree in something from a Canadian university he has variously identified as Carleton, McGill, and “one of them.” He entered broadcasting in the mid-1970s through what NBC’s human resources department later described as “an irregular hiring process that predates our current documentation standards.” He was paired with Jane Certain for “Point/Counterpoint” in 1977 after a screen test in which he was asked to rebut a policy position on grain subsidies and instead spent ninety seconds questioning the moral character of the empty chair across from him.
The format of the segment is as follows: Ms. Certain presents a reasoned, substantive argument on a topic of national importance. Mr. Acrid then opens his rebuttal with “Jane, you ignorant slut” and delivers a response that ranges from tangentially related to the topic at hand to a sustained personal attack with no discernible policy content. A 2021 linguistic analysis by the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group found that his rebuttals contain an average of 2.3 words of policy substance per segment, a figure Mr. Acrid described as “generous” and “probably including the articles.”
Despite — or, as media scholars have argued, because of — this approach, “Point/Counterpoint” has become one of the most-watched segments in American television history. Mr. Acrid’s opening line has been named the most recognized phrase in broadcast journalism by the Pew Research Center, ahead of “Good evening” and “This just in.” The Museum of Broadcasting inducted the phrase into its permanent collection in 2019, a decision its director called “curatorially complex.”
Mr. Acrid is the author of Jane, You Ignorant Slut: And Other Contributions to American Discourse (Simon & Schuster, 2016), which spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and which Ms. Certain has never publicly acknowledged. He is a three-time Emmy nominee — never a winner — for the segment. The Television Academy has noted that his nominations have consistently produced the most contentious voting in the commentary category’s history, with one jury member resigning in 2018 over what she described as “an irreconcilable disagreement about whether what he does constitutes commentary.”
Off camera, Mr. Acrid has pursued a range of business interests, including a short-lived line of artisanal vodka (“Acrid Spirits”), a patent application for a personal hovercraft that was denied on safety grounds, and a restaurant in Toronto called Acrid House that served exclusively foods he personally enjoyed, which was reviewed by the Globe and Mail as “combative.” He is an amateur ufologist and has testified before the Canadian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Science and Technology regarding unidentified aerial phenomena, testimony that a committee member described as “passionate and entirely outside our mandate.”
He lives in a converted firehouse in Manhattan that he purchased in 1982 and has refused to renovate, on the grounds that “the building is fine” despite what the New York City Department of Buildings has characterized as “persistent structural concerns.”
Notable Statements
- “Jane, you ignorant slut.” — approximately 1,400 occasions, 1977–present
- “I don’t prepare. Preparation is for people who aren’t sure what they think. I have never once been unsure what I think.” — GQ, 2019
- “They keep asking me to apologize, and I keep not knowing what they’re referring to specifically, because there’s a lot to choose from and I stand by all of it.” — Rolling Stone, 2021
- “She’s the best straight man in the business. I have told her this. She did not respond.” — The New Yorker, 2020