Satirical news as a European public utility
Few joke-forms are so beguilingly efficient as the satirical news headline. Consider a well-wrought one: « Fetus aborted after too few likes for ultrasound ». I remember coming across this one in 2012 on Facebook (obviously) and feeling a wonderful shock. It’s a full ideological roller-coaster in under ten words. And then there’s the sub-joke — « should you saddle a child with prenatal unpopularity? » — skewering a genre (parental anxiety clickbait) that deserves to be skewered. So dark, but that’s part of the efficiency: bring the reader so quickly to the darkest place but also trust, just as quickly, that the reader will land at the ethical conclusion.
There’s something special — let’s say pure — about the form: a short, funny news headline, together with an image that reinforces the joke. A perfect mini-puzzle that gives the reader a momentary thrill of possessing superior intelligence, the understanding that comes after a millisecond pause of hilarity. (There might be an added benefit, too, of information: I’ve often experienced learning of news fact through satirical headlines before reading the actual news news). There’s also something fleeting about the form, insofar as it is so tethered to internet consumption, and to internet-time.
That joke article appeared in the Dutch platform De Speld, our version of The Onion. Pretty much every European country has an Onion — Germany’s Der Postillon (founded in 2008), France’s Le Gorafi (2012), Austria’s Die Tagespresse (2013), Ireland’s Waterford Whispers (2009), Italy’s Lercio (2012), Spain’s El Mundo Today (2009) — indeed somehow has to have an Onion. They feel almost like public utilities, which is to say that they’ve come to be taken for granted. Satirical news is as old as real news, to be sure, but it has taken a particular form in our time. The Onion started as a satirical print newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, and has served as a blueprint for satirical news media around the world. « The Dutch version of The Onion » rings a bell in a way that « The German version of Private Eye » would not.
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- An episode from Dutch politics is illustrative here, though it involves two politicians whom no one outside this country would have reason to know. In a debate in 2017, the leader of the Dutch Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (Calvinist), Kees van der Staaij, attributed a quote to his Christian-Democratic rival, Sybrand Buma. « Before we put our signature to something, we first get very angry about it », van der Staaij said that Buma said: « That’s what we stand for at the CDA. The Netherlands deserves a party that can separate word and deed. » But Buma never said this; van der Staaij was reciting, with a serious face, an article in De Speld. The smile that creeps onto Buma’s toothy face as Van der Staaij reads the line aloud shows, I think, the slippery political uses of this particular satirical form: the delight that Van der Staaij doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that this is satire. Deep, deep satisfaction, even if the original article was, after all, a mockery of Buma’s own emptiness, his own political spinelessness (« Buma puts up adamant opposition at formation negotiations: ‘Worthless proposal, where can I sign?’ »). Poor Van der Staaij, after the blunder had already gone viral, insisted that of course he knew he was not quoting from real news; it was everyone else who’d failed to get his masterful irony. A paradoxical achievement: the joke (by veteran Speld writer Sake van der Wal and editor-in-chief Jochem van den Berg) had entered the non-satirical world of politics and assumed a measurable weight in that world — but was also immediately co-opted by this political class. You lunge at the bear, you strike the fierce foe with your sharpest weapon, but it laughs heartily with you, gives you a hug, thanks you for the poking. ↩︎
- « Unfortunately, this man dedicated his career to putting a website on the internet and making sure that publication is regularly updated with fresh articles and videos that attract web traffic. Out of everything he could have done with his finite and precious lifespan, he foolishly chose to spend it toiling away pumping out bite-sized pieces of ‘content’ so that the website that employs him could earn more ad revenue for its corporate owners. » ↩︎