An introduction to satire

This post, today

Satire is the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticise people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

Obligatory intro where I talk about myself

I am not really interested in reading the news any more. Like most over-stimulated modern people, I can’t handle much more than a meme or a 30 second clip. In my younger London tech-job years, I’d be the first to grab a free newspaper on “the tube”. I’d fill my head full of the topical violence set in a political wasteland, with lashings of British belittling sensationalism on top. All on my way to 8 hours in a job I hated. These are all great things to do if you want to have a nervous breakdown in your 30s!

Yeah, because of YOU

However I love writing Satire, it’s an interesting exercise to write within a specific parameter. I particularly like writing headlines, which is how my parter and I AKA Knifecrab got to be freelance writers for Reductress and 20% Berlin. I also co-produce The Berlin News Quiz at Comedy Cafe Berlin.

We made this - reductress.com

Working with Reductress was a humbling experience. They want you to pitch 10 headlines at a time, and It’s actually a lot of work. We’d spend at least 1/2 a day brainstorming, and 1/2 a day finessing the final pitch. Which in ADHD time is like a whole week. Then you’d wait with baited breath to see if you actually got one headline in, and often you didn’t. We put our favourite rejects on @knifecrab.

The difficulty with this kind of job is you never really know what they are looking for, or how many pitches they had that week, or what is too close to one they had before. It could be that they didn’t even see your pitch, At least that’s what we’d tell ourselves.

Satire (like all comedy) should be relatable

You might notice that in satire publications like The Onion/Reductress, they don’t always tackle news stories, they talk about very relatable things in a newsy tone.

If you do want to tackle a news story, Don’t try and tackle all of it at once, break it down. Try and identify what it means to you, and what emotions it evokes. Always see if you can make the punchline very surprising.

Lots of comedians are of the lefty-liberal snowflake persuasion (myself included), but we’re far more complex than our political views. Isn’t the nuance more interesting? We can mostly agree that capitalism is hugely problematic, but who could honestly say they’d turn down a million bucks? And what are you going to do, give it to charity? No you’d squander it on treats before you could say “Here are the keys to your new Ferrari”. It’s this gap between wanting to do the right thing, and actually doing the human thing which can be really funny. The greatest and easiest thing you can satirise is not politics or society, but humanity. Always always look for the human element in anything you write.

Why write satire?

Thank you for this question, my own heading. In the age of memes, TikToks and Tweets(RIP) it’s a good skill to be able to boil down a contemporary idea into a neat little statement. Also, if you are a stand-up and something big has happened in the news, It’s weird not to mention it in some way? At the same time you want a fresh angle on it because boy did we get bored of covid jokes after a minute.

Avoid “clapter”

I usually warn my beginner students away from starting with political and social commentary. If you haven’t answered the question “Who am I and how do I relate to my audience?”, and jump straight to “Gee the world is bad” You might be one of those nauseating comedians who just tell people things they already know. “Fuck Trump eh!?” Yes indeed, he is a bad man.

Nope. I don’t care if you can do the voice.

Writing jokes about your own experiences is the life-drawing of comedy. Once you get really good at that, and develop a really solid performance style, then you can branch out into external issues. You can often see this if you look back at a famous comedian's earlier work. Many start with observational humour; my wife, my dick, my cat. Then once their voice is really developed, and they have learned how to make people laugh, the attention can shift outwards. (plus they eventually run out of things to say about their wife, dick and cat and combinations thereof).

Skipping the first step and just jumping right towards social commentary can be a mistake, it can leave one with an underdeveloped voice; it can mean you become a master of nothing more than “clapter”. Which is a portamento of “Clap” and “laughter”. It means people are clapping (agreeing) instead of laughing.

[A] cardinal sin among comedians: Seeking applause instead of laughs. Applause are polite, laughs are primal. That’s why, among good comics, clapter (i.e. “message-driven comedy that inadvertently prioritizes political pandering above comedic merit”) isn’t a desired goal.

After all, it’s easy to get applause; you just have to pander and chew it up for ‘em. “I just got engaged,” “We just had a baby,” “I’m a feminist,” etc. Congrats, the trained seals are now clapping along. You didn’t really do anything interesting, though. Frequently, applause are the approval a comic seeks when they can’t actually generate laughs.  

Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian

- Moral superiority is a snooze