Funny haha

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.

I have been working as a writer for De Speld for about eight years. (De Speld means « The Pin », although De Speld has a sister publication in Dutch called De Pin, which, like Reductress, mostly satirizes « women’s media ».) It was founded in 2007 by Jochem van den Berg and Melle van den Berg, after Jochem’s student days in America, where he watched The Daily Show and read and appreciated The Onion.

It was, if the cliché will be forgiven, a more innocent time. Starting a blog was cheap or free, and it was an easy way to create a platform and develop something like a voice, that you could publish without being gatekept by traditional media’s editors. It had something like a democratic potential before algorithms turned it to shit. Anyway, that voice could soon afterwards be amplified by the explosive popularity of Facebook. That environment in turn was a sort of pressure-cooker, because it seemed uniquely possible to measure a joke’s success, with ruthless absoluteness, by the quantity of likes and clicks it received.

I submitted my first joke to De Speld before really writing for them (they were sort of sharing an office with VICE Netherlands, which I was editing then — another one of those publications riding the Facebook bullet train to viral success). The headline: « Youth illiteracy alarmingly high. » It was about how youth illiteracy was on the rise: the younger the youths, the more illiterate they were, approaching an alarming rate, for infants, of 100 percent.

One indication of The Onion’s place in the social infrastructure is the fact that « Not The Onion » commonly describes news so absurd that it could be satire, but is not. A similar thing has happened in Europe. In the Netherlands
you have forums (on Reddit and Facebook, for example) where news is shared under the heading « not De Speld ». In France, « pas Le Gorafi » has 40.000 Reddit followers, and in Germany, people talk about « Not Der Postillion ». News satire platforms have thereby achieved a negative officialness.

The reverse also happens, when some portion of the population falls for it, taking an article in De Speld as real. Even though fooling readers is never the intention, such stories can, alas, boost such a publication’s success, and can help entrench a satirical newspaper’s position in the firmament. In 2009, the Netherlands’ largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, took a report from De Speld as actual news. There’s a Dutch snack called « patatje oorlog » (war fries), which is fries with mayonnaise, satay sauce and raw onions. De Speld’s joke was about a restaurant in Zeeland that had had introduced a « Patatje Holocaust », and De Telegraaf reported on the fuss. (Today it boggles the mind that the joke was even published, but hey, more innocent times?) In 2011, another real paper, the Haarlems Dagblad, reported earnestly on a joke from De Speld (« 200 kilos of tuna found in cargo of cocaine »), turning it — spuriously! — into news.

Austria’s Die Tagespresse started in 2013, a bit later than the others, but it achieved virality after only two weeks with an article about Edward Snowden seeking asylum in Austria to avoid deportation to the US. (Austria, apparently, is notorious for its slow-moving asylum procedures.) The joke went so viral that the Austrian Foreign Ministry announced that Snowden had not in fact landed in Austria, that it was a satirical post, not real.

I worry: does satire become funnier when others don’t get it, and are therefore owned by it? Is this what satirical news eventually becomes? A thing that separates the clever part of the public (the part that gets it) from the gullible rump that doesn’t? — and then furnishes for the clever a tool to gloat with? One might argue that this curious cocktail of mockery and legitimation is, at least in politics, the function of the public utility that is satirical news.¹ But this is not what De Speld & co are after. The truth is that editors assume everyone will understand the joke.

Jokes are not written with deception in mind. Deception is vulgar, tasteless, base. Once, without meaning to, I achieved such an « owning ». I wrote a piece about a Young-Adult version of Nijntje, the beloved Dutch children’s cartoon rabbit (« Miffy » elsewhere) who gets into the sweetest tiny adventures and whose mild antics have sold over a hundred million books worldwide. In my satirical, YA-version, « Nijn » (Miff?) now has a septum ring and they identify as non-binary. On Facebook, a woman commented that she hoped no one would read that garbage — referring, that is, to the fictional book Nijn that my piece mentioned. People responded with an eager Schadenfreude, triumphantly announcing that « omg, lol, this was De Speld. » The woman eventually apologized and let it be known that she sincerely did not know it was satire. Is it funny to dunk on this lady? Yes, kind of. Her reaction was a pitch perfect example of the mindset I aimed to critique through satire. Is the dunking good? I don’t know. No, probably not. A good joke, the good joke, should strive towards some other form of communion.

In 2017, the first European satire summit took place in Amsterdam at the instigation of Dutch editor-in-chief Jochem van den Berg. Delegations from Ireland, France, Austria, Germany, Spain and Italy traveled to Amsterdam to exchange ideas on conceiving and publishing satire, and to facilitate the translation of pieces across different national outlets. Publishing practices would be discussed, avenues of collaboration would be explored. I was also allowed to attend.

The first day, I was struck by how similar all these European satirists were. Almost all of them were male, ranging from late twenties to late thirties in age, smoothly dressed but not « hip », almost all of them with a background in the Humanities. They looked more or less innocent, or let me say innocuous, non-threatening. In no way would one have guessed that they had managed to amass millions of European followers. In almost nothing was it apparent that here was a roomful of people with influence, that these people did possess something, shall we say, threatening. The publisher of Le Gorafi, for example, was a stocky man with a beard and a belly, who had gathered 1,4 million Facebook followers in France with his company, people who understood and appreciated his satire, had helped him get on TV, publish books, put people to work. (One of Le Gorafi’s early viral jokes, from 2012, was « Felix Baumgartner va tenter la traversée de l’Île de France en solitaire et en RER B »: Felix Baumgartner [the skydiver who skydove back to earth from space] will traverse the Paris region solely using the RER B [a much-maligned French public transport system].) The founder of Der Postillion, Stefan Sichermann, was a former PR man who started the site in 2008 as a hobby, and subsequently had « more social media impact than the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung » (according to Wikipedia). Approachable, friendly, but also tough and competent enough to write your brand into something of a household expression: that’s what these people were.

The summit resulted in an agreement — let’s call it a provisional free-satirical-trade agreement — in which, under certain conditions, these independent satirical publications could freely translate each other’s pieces to their respective audiences. This raised interesting lines of political and philosophical inquiry. Were some jokes archetypically national? Are there jokes that are totally fine and acceptable in, say, Germany that would be not only unmakable but unthinkable in, say, the Netherlands? Could a country’s satire show us its (I hesitate to use the word) soul? And what about those jokes that did make it through the translation mechanism — could we deem them (I hesitate again) « European »?

Short answer: I still don’t know. But I did note a few things in trying to figure out what makes a joke translation-worthy. For instance, it often has to prove itself in one territory, so to speak, before it can be adopted in another; if something went viral in one country it could be of interest to others. Or if it related to some larger European or global story, it could become interesting to translate. Most aren’t political, as in these Speld-borrowings from the German Postillion from several years back: « Discovery of bones reveals: first humans lived horizontally underground » (Knochenfund belegt: Frühe Menschen lebten waagerecht unter der Erde — with a delightful sub-joke: « Early ancestors looked like skeletons »); « Box from 1935 finally opened: Schrödinger’s cat is dead » (Seit 1935 geschlossene Box geöffnet: Schrödingers Katze ist eindeutig tot); « Man puts cotton swab too deep in ear and accidentally resets himself to factory settings » (Wattestäbchen zu tief ins Ohr gesteckt: Mann setzt sich versehentlich auf Werkseinstellung zurück). But not everything is apolitical: « White House gets revolving door to fire and hire staff faster » is a 2018 German headline, as is « Bangladesh boy bullied by peers for not sewing branded clothes. » The explicitly politically-charged ones are often about things familiar to the widest possible audience — Trump and Putin, most commonly. From 2017: « IKEA offers Trump solution for wall at Mexican issue border: Börder Wåll ». From 2022: « Putin: I am not a war criminal, but a special operations criminal ».

Dutch jokes, I guess I’m proud to say, get translated into other territories as well, for instance: « Catholic Church presents Waria, the mean counterpart of Maria » (2018). Jokes I co-wrote have also been translated into German, and possibly other languages, like « The 3 most fun long-term pranks to pull off with your newborn child » (2023). In translation, that one became « 5 epic Langzeit-Streiche, die Sie Ihrem Neugeborenen spielen können ». Why
five instead of three? Why « epic » instead of « fun »? (Germans, in my anecdotal experience, write longer satirical pieces than the Dutch do. Not for nothing does « Brevity is the soul of wit » translate into German as « Es ist allgemein bekannt, dass die Essenz geistreicher Bemerkungen nicht in ihrer ausufernden Länge liegt, sondern vielmehr in der kunstvollen Fähigkeit, eine tiefgründige Weisheit in möglichst wenigen, wohl gewählten Worten zum Ausdruck zu bringen. »)

Aging is a common theme amongst these « European » jokes. A Spanish headline from 2017: « Only talk old woman was going to make today fails: Lack of arm strength not an appealing topic for young audience, » (Anciana fracasa al intentar entablar la única conversación que iba a tener en todo el día). There was a sad German joke — « Poverty among the elderly: more and more elderly are being fed by ducks » (Wachsende Altersarmut: Immer mehr Rentner werden von Enten gefüttert) — that apparently resonated enough with a Speld-editor to be translated into Dutch. Fashion jokes are also widely applicable. A German joke about boys wearing ankle scarves to accompany their shoes without socks was deemed relevant for the Netherlands, too.

Aging and fashion. Are these the warp and woof of European satirical news? The translated articles are rarely about a country’s particular politics, but it doesn’t never happen. « Puigdemont pays bail with self-signed 75.000-cataleuro bill » (Der Postillion, 2018) is about former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, who became news across Europe in 2018 for threatening to declare Catalonia independent. A joke about Volkswagen — « Volkswagen bosses hope nothing comes out about crash tests with panda babies » (2018) — can have a « European » sweep. In February 2020, in Hanau, Germany, after a far-right terrorist killed nine people and wounded five others, and then killed his mother and himself, Der Postillon aimed its biting headline at the Alternative für Deutschland party: « Attack in Hanau: AfD mourns death of voter ».

Looking at such jokes can make one weary. They age quickly. Who was it for? Did it meet the moment? Could it? Linger too long and things will start feeling dire very fast. Satire, philosophically speaking, leans liberal. As a leftist, you’re probably stuck fortifying the libs, but you hope for more radical resonance. It can be bleak, anyhow: make fun of PVV, AFD and Rassemblement National all you want, it hasn’t stopped them from winning elections.

I do not know what distinguishes a « German » joke from a « Dutch » one, nor can I say what this machinery of translation says about « European satire », for better or worse. The European Union, though, doesn’t yet really lend itself to this type of satirization. Here’s a Spanish attempt, from El Mundo Today in 2022: « United Kingdom calls drunken EU at 4am to ask if they will get back together ». A good premise: we feel the UK’s heartbreak, Brexit’s stupidity. And maybe when we read this joke, we’re united — as True Continental European States — in righteous pride and pity, in this satirical Ode to Joy. Speaking of pity, by the way, it is interesting to note a publication called Le Chou which was, I believe, founded somewhere near the end of 2020, and which publishes satirical news strictly about European matters. Its jokes, alas, do not inspire: « Charles Michel Returns From Vacation, Finds Janez Janša At His Desk Pretending To Be EU Council President » (2021). Not a super-joke to be honest — pretty lame, too explanatory, not elegantly written, but revealing in its badness. « Mark Rutte’s OnlyFans Doesn’t Have Many Subscribers », featuring Dutch then-PM Mark Rutte: marginally better, but only marginally. Maybe the trouble is the lack of a « European » audience that would connect with these jokes. Maybe we’ll only know a true European Union — a union of spirit, mind and civility — when a « European satire » is working successfully, vibrantly, resonating with a truly European audience.

There was another satire summit in 2022, this time in Barcelona. I was brought along. The participants were already a lot more diverse, with women and people of color, and the men were better dressed than in 2017, save for some German IT guys, but they didn’t look like they tried or cared. Innovative strategies were discussed. The Austrians, notably, pioneered a piece of stunt satire in 2021, by suing a far-right politician. As a politician, he was paid by the state, they argued, and the absurd things he said amounted to unfair competition with the satirical news industry. It was a coup for Die Tagespresse: the court had declared the case admissible, the stunt became news, and it earned the site hundreds of new paying subscribers. The Germans, for their part, had created a satirical game: an airport simulator. « Chaotic Airport Construction Manager » celebrated the fact that it had taken Berlin fourteen years to finish an airport. In the game, you oversaw the construction, but every time you got close to completing the project, a new problem loomed.

But the atmosphere was heavier. How, for instance, to deal with the war in Ukraine? The Germans had had problems with the fact that one of their writers was enough of a critic of Western Putin-critics to be a « tankie », which of course should be possible in the context of pluralism, but is a lot more difficult in the context of fighting against fascism and in favor of humanity. Me, I felt both proud and sad to be there. I remembered a particularly brutal and funny headline by Clickhole (a former subsidiary of The Onion that was founded to satirize the inanity of Internet publishing in the 2010s — think Buzzfeed): « Heartbreaking: This Man Works For A Website ».² Why do it if you’re
not getting paid a wage that helps you get to a pension age? It sure as shit wasn’t to « own » the populists. One time in 2022, I wrote a piece about the leader of BBB, The Netherlands’ farmer’s party: « Caroline van der Plas personally strangles calf while looking mother cow in the eye to make a point », I joked, only for Caroline van der Plas to retweet the joke saying something like, « damn right. Feel like eating steak right now », and subsequently gain five seats in Parliament in the next election in 2023.

There are other European publications that aren’t in the partnership program with De Speld, so they’ve always been outside of my field of awareness. In 2018 a Reddit thread asked, « Does your country have an equivalent to the onion? » Redditors flocked to answer this question, often with their favorite jokes.

I surveyed the European ones, and thus were my eyes opened to satirical publications from Romania, Serbia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Bulgaria.It made my eyes water. The jokes I encounter there are absolutely bewildering. Partly it is due to the fact that I read them via Google Translate, partly it is because I miss much of the context, partly it is because of the content. One comment mentioned a Czech satire site. The favorite joke? That there was a house that looks like Stephen Hawking — a parody, I suppose, of that one house in Swansea that looks like Hitler. The house on the Czech site was kind of crooked and bent, a bit like the late physicist in his wheelchair. A humorless nightmare of a joke, a gruesome mirror for those who engage in satire themselves. Other jokes didn’t — couldn’t — make sense to me. « Scooter will write a new version of the National Anthem », the Lithuanian publication 1K headlines in 2021, with a photo of kitsch techno artist Scooter attached.

« A police officer overcame baldness by using all eyebrows plucked over time » (2024). What? On the Greek site Tovatraxi.com (Το Βατράχι, or: « The Frog »), I get an introduction to national politics. « The EOF approved the use of speeches by Nikos Androulakis for those suffering from chronic insomnia » (2024). EOF is the Greek national organization for medicine, I understand after googling, and Androulakis is the head of the Greek Social Democrats. Another joke required more research: « Hollywood is preparing an action film based on the life of Riga Feraios » (2024). Riga Feraios, I learn, was a national hero from the Greek Enlightenment who lived from 1757 to 1798 and played an important role in Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. I still don’t get the joke, but then I see the image: a movie poster that says, « The Fast and the Thourious ». « Thourious » was a popular battle song written by Feraios; Feraios’s face was photoshopped onto Vin Diesel’s body. All that effort for a pun?

And jokes about vegetarians: « Tragedy in a village after a young man reveals that he is a vegetarian » (2024). It’s hard to tell if the joke is on vegetarians or for vegetarians. The Romanian satire publication Times New Roman has a similar hangup with veganism: « A vegan destroyed 19 fruit-gambling machines in an attempt to get to the fruit » (2024). « An avid vegan had all the meat surgically removed from his body » (2024). Who is this for? Why does this exist? I glean that the publication was founded in 2009 by an advertising man who had studied philosophy, who had also been inspired by The Onion, and that the term « Times New Roman » had become a household expression in Romania to describe absurd or untrue-sounding news. In 2012, a viral item — that the Orthodox Church was going to impose a tax on Romanians named after saints (« Patriarch Daniel: Romanians with names of saints will pay a fee to continue using them ») — was taken for real news by some Romanian media.

At the same time, I noticed currents of impressive bleakness in its headlines:

• After accidentally eating a piece of chalk, a Romanian remembered what cheese tasted like during Communism.
• The Freezing Rain Effect. The citizens of Bucharest reported a walrus invasion after seeing hipsters with icicles in their beards.
• The Minister of Health: « Stop giving bribes in hospitals! Give them outside the hospital, because there are cameras on the inside. »
• It could have been worse. Instead of the wave of cold weather, it could have been the Red Army coming toward us from Russia.
• Tourism agencies complain about unfair competition: « the DNA (anti-corruption agency) sent more Romanians in exotic countries than us. »
• Romania, officially the most popular escape room in the world. Until now, 5 million players have escaped.

And then there are so many other sites that leave me completely in the dark. « Borisov: I am not afraid of Magnitsky, but of Peevski, » headlines the Bulgarian satire site Не!Новините (nenovinite.com, 2024). Borisov is the Bulgarian prime minister, Peevsky an influential businessman and Magnitsky a US law dating back to the Obama era apparently designed to impose sanctions on individuals involved in human rights violations and corruption. Another joke is « The fisting diet has become a hit among lovers of alternative nutrition » (2024). It includes a picture of a brown fist and implies that followers of the diet take food anally. It includes a quote from « Oscar Fistorious »: « This diet is simple to follow and there is only one single rule: the mouth is only for talking. » As I wrote: bewildering.

Taking in all these jokes, and bearing in mind that I do not know the context, the culture, and the endless parade of satirical publications and their endless series of jokes of this caliber — jokes I do not take in, cannot take in — gives me a sense of the complexity, multiplicity and size of Europe, a vastness I quite often lose sight of when I take in news about Berlin or Brussels, when I read about Macron or about Rutte, now Secretary general of NATO. Europe! Just a continent full of people who apparently laugh at things that few others can understand. Somewhere a Bulgarian is laughing his ass off at the idea of Oscar Fistorious saying you should put food in your ass with your fist.

This exercise can only dishearten. Do my jokes in De Speld look the same to a Romanian satirist reading my work in translation? One of my own favorite jokes — a headline I’m proud of and that’s close to my heart — is from 2018: « Cow is sick, but doesn’t know in which stomach. » But now the dread overtakes me. I’m not sure whether the nausea is in my Magen, my buik, my boilg, my stomaco.

After eight years of writing satirical headlines, and after this exercise of deciphering examples from other countries, the initial delightfulness of encountering the form some fourteen years ago has faded. There is something about a joke that is your non-friend. There will be people who find something funny because they assume there is a group of people who don’t understand it. Discussing this with a buddy, I realized that I myself am not completely free of that sentiment. But I also realized that such scorn, though present, is not the foundation of news satire.

In fact, when I look at my own favorite jokes in De Speld, they are apolitical, and silly in their own small way. They are scornless. They might also be untranslatable. I once wrote a piece entitled: « We ranked four Wadden Islands by how much their names resemble ‘Aanbeland’ ». This was funny, I should explain, because in Dutch, « aanbeland » means « arrived », specifically an arrival after some wandering. And because « Aanbeland » sounds almost exactly the same as « Ameland », which is the name of a Dutch island in the Wadden Sea off the north coast. And it was funny because in fact there are five inhabited Dutch Wadden Islands, not four, and we did not include Ameland in our list. Indeed we had photoshopped the island of Ameland off of the map as well.

The exclusion of Ameland from the list made an already stupid (yet rarefied) joke even stupider (and more rarefied). The fun for me was in how silly it was, how droll, and how it expressed a kind of meta-satire on « media » in general. I tire myself out by writing it up this way, so belabored, but I feel a deep fondness for this un-gettable joke, as if it were an antidote to something, an antidote to the creeping feeling that words have for some time now ceased to matter, for the feeling that only the power and vitality that underlies those words is of any import left.