How to Test Negative for Stupid

What It Is

Published on 7 October 2025 by Broadside Books, the conservative imprint of HarperCollins, under the full title How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will. John Kennedy has been the junior senator from Louisiana since 2017. He went to Vanderbilt, then to law school at Virginia, then to Oxford, and he speaks in the broadest drawl in national politics. That gap is the comic engine of the man and of this book.

It is a comic account of the institution he works in: hearing-room stories, Louisiana politics, the machinery of the Senate, the press, the staff, the donors. Part memoir, part invective, part stand-up set. It went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

The register is dry rather than furious. He is not shouting at Washington. He is describing it, slowly, and letting the description do the work.

Why It Matters

Kennedy is one of the very few politicians in either party whose lines escape the news cycle and survive on their own, and this book is the fullest document of that. It is also the best available portrait of a style of American politics that runs on being underestimated. The Oxford degree and the accent are both authentic. Working out which one is the costume is the reader's job, and the book will not do it for you.

Underneath the comedy is a complaint that is neither new nor trivial: that Washington has become a self-dealing professional class, decoupled from the country it governs, and impossible to embarrass into changing. That charge has been made from the left and from the right for fifty years. The interesting thing is that it keeps being made by people who are themselves inside the building and intend to stay there.

The weaknesses follow from what the book is. It is a politician's book written by a man still in office, and it is careful about exactly the things a serving politician is careful about; nobody powerful is seriously damaged in it. Comedy is also a way of not making an argument, and the book is at its weakest where it is funniest, landing a line and moving on rather than following the thought somewhere that would cost him something. Its account of the capital's dysfunction is notably gentler on the author's own side of the aisle than on the other.

It is a very funny book about a serious complaint, and the humour is doing double duty: it entertains you, and it saves the author from ever having to be specific.

Before You Read

Short and fast. An evening or two. Nothing in the prose will slow you, because the prose is built on the rhythms of speech rather than of writing.

Know the man before you open it. Watch ten minutes of Kennedy questioning a witness in a Senate Judiciary hearing. The book is nearly unreadable in the wrong voice and extremely funny in the right one.

This is a sitting Republican senator's book. It makes no attempt at balance, and it would be a worse book if it did.

Which Edition to Read

• The audiobook, read by Kennedy himself, 2025 — recommended. This is a book made of timing, written by a professional talker, and the author reads it. Several of the jokes do not really work on the page at all. It is the rare case where the audio is not a convenience but the correct edition. The cost: you cannot flip back to a line you liked, and the best passages reward the rereading only print allows. View on Amazon →
• The Broadside Books hardcover. The first edition, the one to have signed, and the one to lend. The cost: the material is thinner on the page than in the ear, and you will find yourself supplying his voice as you read, which is a strange way to have to work.
• The ebook. Cheapest, searchable, entirely serviceable, and the least of the three.

Listen to it. Buy the hardcover as well if you want to give it to someone.

Getting the Most From This Book

Watch the construction of the jokes. Kennedy's method is a flat set-up in ordinary Washington language, followed by a concrete rural image that has no business in the sentence. It is a formula, and once you see it working it does not stop being funny. It starts being craft.

Notice what he does not say. This book is most revealing in its silences, and what a serving senator declines to criticise tells you more about the Senate than anything he is willing to mock.

The commonest mistake is to come to it for policy, or to come to it for outrage. It is neither. It is a comic performance by a man with an unusually clear view of the institution that pays him.