How to Write Satire

[Vlad]

Note, shamelessly compiled from the good folks at www.magiclampoon.com, mainly "dbuel" and "Energizer"

 

 

 

Well, like I posted before - somewhere else, don't recall exactly - I'm the editor of my school's satirical newspaper.

 

To start this year off right, I prepared a little "How-To" Guide for my underlings, but figured you guys might enjoy it, or maybe even pick up a little trick or too. We are a group of writers, after all.

 

(Remember this is in the context of Satirical News, but can be applied to all satire)

 

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How to write a fake news article?

 

Of course, when it comes to comedy, no one is an expert. Humor is very personal. However, when writing a fake news article, there are some ideas upon which even people with differing senses of humor might come to agree.

 

The idea of a fake news article is that it has the seemliness of a real news article. It reads like real news, it has the style of real news, it has some of the characteristics of real news, and so on. Lacking these things, your fake news article ceases to be "fake news" and becomes some other sort of joke.

 

Most people aren't journalists, and so most people would reasonably have little way of knowing some of the principles of journalism. These same principles of written journalism apply to satire and fake news.

 

News stories in most cases are really about quotes. Ask yourself, what is "reporting"? "Reporting" in its purest sense is writing what you simply observe. Making conclusions is subsequent to "reporting." Making conclusions is "analyzing." Pure reporting is simply relating what was seen and heard.

 

In most news stories, what is seen and heard are sources. The sources speak the information, and so the story fundamentally is what the sources say. The basic premise of the basic news story is to relate to the reader what some sources said.

 

In fact, normally, you don't really see sources doing much of anything other than talking. A lawsuit story? The attorneys tell you why they will win or what they plan to do. A police story? The police have charged someone and they tell you how they caught the person, or why they think the person is guilty. The defense attorney tells you why the person is innocent. A county commission story? A commissioner tells you what he plans to do. A resident tells you what he will ask the commission to do. The talking is, in most stories, what constitutes your observations.

 

The quotes, then, are tremendously important in a real news story. Many written news stories consist of a reporter obtaining some great quotes and then writing the story around them.

 

So in your fake news story, the quotes are equally important. The quotes should often be where you put the punch lines. Your fake story is made up of silly people doing silly things, and quotes are how those people can be in your story. The narration is just you being in the story, and so you should narrate as little as possible.

 

Again, since most people are not journalists, it may not occur to most people how quotes are the backbone of a standard written news story.

 

Another principle of written journalism is that paragraphs are extremely short. You may never have noticed, but if you pick up your newspaper, you will see that most paragraphs in the paper are one sentence, or perhaps two. Rarely will there be a paragraph much longer than that. The reason for this is because newspaper columns are very narrow, and so long paragraphs would be compounded into even greater length by the format. The fake news should follow the style to imitate that newspaper feel.

 

Some other principles to keep in mind are that newspapers are careful to identify in what city and on what date an event occurred. Newspapers also try to mention the next step if a story is about a process, and try to include a reaction from someone other than the initial source.

 

One interesting thing about a news story, as opposed to an essay that you might write, is that in a common news story, the first sentence often can stand by itself as having summarized the entire news story. In fact, in most common news stories, the first sentence is designed such that even if you read it and it only, you would still have a basic understanding of what happened.

 

The first sentence actually describing the essence of the story is so important, newspaper people gave it a special name. They call it a lede. They even spell the word funny.

 

In most common news stories, the lede is the first sentence and completely summarizes what happened. You could just read the first sentence and have a basic understanding of the story. Everything after that is elaboration.

 

Now, this isn't always true. In some newspaper stories, there's a clever introduction and then you really find out what's going on a few sentences later. This is uncommon enough to be referred to by newspaper people as a delayed lede. You can see that if there's a special name for the situation where the third sentence contains the story's point, then that situation is thought to be unusual in newspapering.

 

The joke stories that we do here should be, for the most part, very short. Having a couple long ones is good, but they can be hard to develop. Short stories are much easier to write, and the joke is easier to convey. In most stories, there is no room for a delayed lede. The lede will have to be a normal lede.

 

Given that your story is the normal short one, and since these stories are jokes, this means that the very first sentence of your story should contain the essence of the joke. The joke shouldn't wait several sentences. By trying to make the joke wait a few sentences, you will ruin the effect of your joke news story being a news story, and it will seem extremely forced. It won't read like a joke news story, and people will lose interest.

 

Satire needs to be more to-the-point by its very nature, the joke should be shown quickly to the reader with the rest of the article explaining the funny.

 

A person attempting to write a fake news story might try the following template:

• Sentence stating silly thing that happened -- what, where and when.

• New paragraph: Sentence stating who was there or who was involved.

• New paragraph: Silly quote from person just mentioned.

• New paragraph: Sentence stating who reacted to thing.

• New paragraph: Silly quote from reacting person.

 

And that's it. Attempting a simple template like the above can be helpful in keeping in mind the principles we've looked at above.

 

Humor shouldn't slavishly follow a formula, but a template can be helpful when trying to do something imitative such as a fake news story.

 

It is helpful to think of news articles as tied-together dialogue, and funny dialogue is way easier to write than funny anything-else.

 

A good explanation of jokes from How the Mind Works, by Pinker, who cites Koestler.

 

A joke consists of 3 elements:

• Something doesn't make sense

• There's a shift in frame of reference that causes it to make sense

• As a result of the shift in frame of reference, someone loses dignity

 

It looks to me like this model very often applies. There is more info on humor in the book, but I'm sticking to this short catchy bit.

 

This isn't a blueprint you can use for writing jokes. In fact, it is very doubtful that such a blueprint can exist. However it can help you identify jokes that no-one is actually going to laugh at, or help you figure out why no-one laughed. For example puns are often missing loss of dignity, which is why we associate them with groans and not laughs.

Edited November 30, 2005 by Vlad