A few words on craft, @NY Expat, if you're interested:
That particular line, which is indeed a very straightforward jokey-joke, made several of my pre-readers (longtime comedy/media people) laugh. I was surprised, but they specifically pointed to it. One guy said to me, "I love the idea that whatever they look at, whatever ill, they're determined to make it about this one obsession of theirs." Like, birds flying into airplane engines--that's TRANS PEOPLE!!!
Jokey-jokes aren't just barrel-fishing, they are invitations for the reader to riff in their own mind. But contemporary readers are passive in a way that readers were not in earlier times; people are overwhelmed with info today, so they don't take that invitation.
But simple jokes like that have another purpose, and it's an important one; they form the basic structure of a piece--"where is the author coming from?'-- and then off of that basic structure you can hang lines that are more obscure/demanding, and hopefully you get everybody. I personally don't prefer comedy millennials call "dry"--tonal, ironic, knowing, "if you get it, you get it"--because as a creator you don't know who's reading the work. With dry comedy it's super easy to misinterpret where the author stands, and in today's political climate where comedy is being used by one side as a dogwhistle, I personally gotta throw in at least a few places where the reader is "led by the nose," so my intent is clear. But that's a personal stylistic choice that not everyone likes, and admittedly really at odds with most of the smart humor one reads today, especially on the internet.
I'm writing all this out because lots of Viral Load readers are interested in this kind of analysis and structure. Thanks for the opportunity to be more visible with my craft, and thanks for reading!
This made me laugh so much, I forwarded it to other people - maybe this piece will go viral! I'm one of the readers who appreciates this in-depth discussion of comedy craft. I'm curious to know how you would describe other aspects of this piece, e.g., could you point to a bit that isn't "straightforward jokey-joke"? With appreciation.
Rachel, thank you! I've done a lot of teaching over the years so I'm pretty transparent and aware of what I'm trying to do.
To me the "antifa rightwing chupacabra" joke isn't a jokey joke -- it relies on an assumption that the reader knows something obscure, and also agrees with the author about the Republican Party. Not just that the GOP is bad, but that they are as a group prone to a particular kind of bloody minded and childlike magical thinking, the same kind that spurs mass sightings of a crytid that preys on goats.
The setup of the piece itself is also not a jokey-joke. It's describing a piece you can't read, via a series of linked articles meant to evoke a kind of exasperated generational back-and-forth; and by the traffic numbers suggest that this back and forth is quite common for precisely the type of people who write Substacks.
Also not a jokey joke: how I used the recipient numbers to describe who the writer is, and what their Substack is like -- only friends and a few family read it. This was posted, read in outrage and delight...then someone posts it to social and it just EXPLODES, because the experience is so common.
(BTW, my own parents are Boomers and I just saw them, and they are not at all like this--but there are so many generational differences in how things are perceived, the seed of the piece was planted in my head.)
And so because the setup is challenging--it's not the "joke-in-the-headline" thing you see everywhere today--I felt I needed to balance that with a lot of color and humor that is immediately comprehendable. The NYT/trans joke is there at the end of the section on purpose.
Now do I really expect all readers to get all this? To read so closely? No. And that's why there are plenty of jokey-jokes to move people through the piece regardless. But the layering is there.
I don't know if other comedy writers do this; I know I do it because I grew up in a time (1970s) where both high and low referent humor was done at a very high level, and people like Monty Python and Mel Brooks and NatLamp mixed it in a way that you just don't see anymore. Python/Brooks/NL all had different proportions of high/low (or, obscure reference/jokey jokes), but I loved the mental flexibility that required. "Oh, the Mayor is fucking his secretary! Oh who is Hedy Lamarr, and why would she sue?"
I did this technique for a whole book with Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody, and was particularly chuffed when a reader would write in having gotten some of the Easter eggs and more challenging stuff. "I read about the interrobang, how cool."
Thanks for breaking down some of your techniques. The juxtaposition of 14 subscribers and subsequent 1 billion plus hits was one that stuck out for me while reading.
This piece reminded me of some early Henry Beard stuff, particularly his magnum opus legal brief about the animal kingdom.
Also-- at first I didn’t realize this was even a piece at all. I’m sure one of the jokey-jokes must have tipped me off, and then I started looking for the more labor-intensive jokes.
For what it’s worth-- I laughed at that joke, even though I don’t agree with what some might see as the subtext, the idea that NYT is wrong in what they write about trans culture.
I want to believe that I laughed for the right reasons, which is probably me treating myself way too generously. At any rate-- I appreciate these explanations.
Also-- I think I’m with you on the problem with dry and jokey-joke. I find that while I prefer dry, as a consumer, jokey-joke at its best can feel like somebody worked at it, while dry at its worst can feel lazy.
‘I personally gotta throw in at least a few places where the reader is "led by the nose,"‘
I do appreciate your exegesis on this particular joke, and on the rest of the joke in a reply below, but I see where there was some confusion about my comment: I wasn’t saying you were leading the reader by the nose with the NYT joke, I was saying your comedy was being led by the nose by a manufactured controversy about three NYT articles that dared to do actual reporting instead of the dozens prior that simply regurgitated Michael Hobbes stan accounts on Twitter. It sounded like the joke was written in an epistemic bubble, and based on the reactions by your pre-readers — who seem to think NYT Pitchbot is the pinnacle of comedy? — that’s likely the case.
I know you said below that you wanted to avoid the “knowing” Millennial style of comedy that was too dry, and therefore prone to misinterpretation, but it still demands the reader agree with the premise that the NYT is somehow “trans-obsessed” in order to be funny (so still in the “if you get it you get it” prison you wanted to avoid):
“There is only mockery, backed by certainty that the reader shares the author’s contempt. Sarcasm is a natural fit for partisan news aggregators, because it relies on a calculated appeal to shared attitudes.”
(“Clapter” might also be a good descriptor of that joke)
Anyway, I gotta run. Aside from that one quibble it was a very funny piece!
Thanks for this @NY Expat! I need to read that linked article again when I'm not befogged by acupuncture, but I quite agree that "sarcasm is our kitsch." Besides being a missed opportunity for authentic connection with a reader, it's also...boring. Dumb? Callow? I don't like it.
The NYT joke we're discussing does take a stand on the issue, but it's not ill-considered on my part, nor driven by a need for Clapter. It came from two sources:
1) First-hand knowledge about NYT Op-Ed after interacting with them over a period of 10-15 years (1991-2005?). Back then, they had these weird "house beliefs" that you had to navigate if you wanted any chance at selling them humor. (Yes they used to run humor.) Where did they come from? Upstairs, I suppose--or the fairly narrow pool of talent they seemed to draw from. These shibboleths were super-real, and the more Panglossian they were when it came to money and power, the more you had to step carefully. You and the editor might privately agree that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal, but joking about that in a piece would be an automatic reject.
So much to say that the folks there were very very good at what I'd call self-preservational editing within a corporate structure--"will this get me fired?"--but if you ever mentioned this, they'd immediately go into the defensive crouch of "how dare you, we are JOURNALISTS" and then after that "how dare you, we are the NEW YORK TIMES". Part of the intended subsonics of the above piece is how even liberal Boomers generally reject ownership-based critiques of institutions like The Times. But having worked with them, I think that's a completely legit way to view them--the owners do set the tone. And this is not something I judge the editors overly harshly about; those editors gotta eat. Whenever readers squawk about NYT coverage--as with Dean Baquet's kid-glove treatment of Trump--my intuition is ALWAYS that readers are perceiving the disconnect between the world the NYT is describing, and the opinions the paper must espouse. I not only think this is worth needling them over, I think it's essential now that there are so few institutional voices.
But believe it or not, I didn't have much of an opinion on the NYT/trans matter until I listened to a 90 minute podcast called "Death Panel." There were a couple of trans writers on there, and not only did their points about the Times make sense, it also sounded exactly like the institution I used to deal with. With this background informing me, I felt comfortable including that joke. Blunt but fair.
I lose concentration during a piece just like any writer, but really do try to see every piece, and ideally every joke, as an opportunity to connect with readers via my own personal experience. I don't mean to talk this to death and only am doing so because I so agree with you that most satire really IS Clapter-bait. Forty years of writing this kind of material makes me at least attempt to deliver something meatier. I'm glad you liked the piece, and thank you again for so thoughtful a response.
This was hilarious! Thank you, I needed this laugh!
Wow, over a billion views! That certainly beats the the time I went viral and got over 100 views. Almost 30% were not immediate family and friends!
Well my family is Catholic, so there are about 750,000,000 of them :-)
Congrats! That's fantastic. But OK! Alright! I missed it and can't find it. I need a link to this viral message. thnx
The conceit of the piece was that I wrote a (fictitious) piece called "Why My Parents..." and it went viral and here are the results in Substack. :-)
Sic semper Tribune
Sam Zell said that after he shot it in the head and leaped to the stage, breaking his ankle
Thanks for the laugh-out-loud piece! Really needed it!
Thank you, Brad!
Mazel Tov...I think!
Someday a piece will do these numbers, I feel SURE of it :-)
"We'd like you to write this as an
Op-Ed, but replace 'your parents' with 'trans people'."
🤦🏻♂️
I respect the craft, but man, good comedy shouldn’t let itself be led around by the nose like that.
A few words on craft, @NY Expat, if you're interested:
That particular line, which is indeed a very straightforward jokey-joke, made several of my pre-readers (longtime comedy/media people) laugh. I was surprised, but they specifically pointed to it. One guy said to me, "I love the idea that whatever they look at, whatever ill, they're determined to make it about this one obsession of theirs." Like, birds flying into airplane engines--that's TRANS PEOPLE!!!
Jokey-jokes aren't just barrel-fishing, they are invitations for the reader to riff in their own mind. But contemporary readers are passive in a way that readers were not in earlier times; people are overwhelmed with info today, so they don't take that invitation.
But simple jokes like that have another purpose, and it's an important one; they form the basic structure of a piece--"where is the author coming from?'-- and then off of that basic structure you can hang lines that are more obscure/demanding, and hopefully you get everybody. I personally don't prefer comedy millennials call "dry"--tonal, ironic, knowing, "if you get it, you get it"--because as a creator you don't know who's reading the work. With dry comedy it's super easy to misinterpret where the author stands, and in today's political climate where comedy is being used by one side as a dogwhistle, I personally gotta throw in at least a few places where the reader is "led by the nose," so my intent is clear. But that's a personal stylistic choice that not everyone likes, and admittedly really at odds with most of the smart humor one reads today, especially on the internet.
I'm writing all this out because lots of Viral Load readers are interested in this kind of analysis and structure. Thanks for the opportunity to be more visible with my craft, and thanks for reading!
This made me laugh so much, I forwarded it to other people - maybe this piece will go viral! I'm one of the readers who appreciates this in-depth discussion of comedy craft. I'm curious to know how you would describe other aspects of this piece, e.g., could you point to a bit that isn't "straightforward jokey-joke"? With appreciation.
Rachel, thank you! I've done a lot of teaching over the years so I'm pretty transparent and aware of what I'm trying to do.
To me the "antifa rightwing chupacabra" joke isn't a jokey joke -- it relies on an assumption that the reader knows something obscure, and also agrees with the author about the Republican Party. Not just that the GOP is bad, but that they are as a group prone to a particular kind of bloody minded and childlike magical thinking, the same kind that spurs mass sightings of a crytid that preys on goats.
The setup of the piece itself is also not a jokey-joke. It's describing a piece you can't read, via a series of linked articles meant to evoke a kind of exasperated generational back-and-forth; and by the traffic numbers suggest that this back and forth is quite common for precisely the type of people who write Substacks.
Also not a jokey joke: how I used the recipient numbers to describe who the writer is, and what their Substack is like -- only friends and a few family read it. This was posted, read in outrage and delight...then someone posts it to social and it just EXPLODES, because the experience is so common.
(BTW, my own parents are Boomers and I just saw them, and they are not at all like this--but there are so many generational differences in how things are perceived, the seed of the piece was planted in my head.)
And so because the setup is challenging--it's not the "joke-in-the-headline" thing you see everywhere today--I felt I needed to balance that with a lot of color and humor that is immediately comprehendable. The NYT/trans joke is there at the end of the section on purpose.
Now do I really expect all readers to get all this? To read so closely? No. And that's why there are plenty of jokey-jokes to move people through the piece regardless. But the layering is there.
I don't know if other comedy writers do this; I know I do it because I grew up in a time (1970s) where both high and low referent humor was done at a very high level, and people like Monty Python and Mel Brooks and NatLamp mixed it in a way that you just don't see anymore. Python/Brooks/NL all had different proportions of high/low (or, obscure reference/jokey jokes), but I loved the mental flexibility that required. "Oh, the Mayor is fucking his secretary! Oh who is Hedy Lamarr, and why would she sue?"
I did this technique for a whole book with Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody, and was particularly chuffed when a reader would write in having gotten some of the Easter eggs and more challenging stuff. "I read about the interrobang, how cool."
You introduced me to the interrobang. You're my interrobang doula.
You are not alone Mike.
Thanks for breaking down some of your techniques. The juxtaposition of 14 subscribers and subsequent 1 billion plus hits was one that stuck out for me while reading.
My pleasure, @rachelleypresents! Hope it wasn't too tedious.
This piece reminded me of some early Henry Beard stuff, particularly his magnum opus legal brief about the animal kingdom.
Also-- at first I didn’t realize this was even a piece at all. I’m sure one of the jokey-jokes must have tipped me off, and then I started looking for the more labor-intensive jokes.
For what it’s worth-- I laughed at that joke, even though I don’t agree with what some might see as the subtext, the idea that NYT is wrong in what they write about trans culture.
I want to believe that I laughed for the right reasons, which is probably me treating myself way too generously. At any rate-- I appreciate these explanations.
Also-- I think I’m with you on the problem with dry and jokey-joke. I find that while I prefer dry, as a consumer, jokey-joke at its best can feel like somebody worked at it, while dry at its worst can feel lazy.
‘I personally gotta throw in at least a few places where the reader is "led by the nose,"‘
I do appreciate your exegesis on this particular joke, and on the rest of the joke in a reply below, but I see where there was some confusion about my comment: I wasn’t saying you were leading the reader by the nose with the NYT joke, I was saying your comedy was being led by the nose by a manufactured controversy about three NYT articles that dared to do actual reporting instead of the dozens prior that simply regurgitated Michael Hobbes stan accounts on Twitter. It sounded like the joke was written in an epistemic bubble, and based on the reactions by your pre-readers — who seem to think NYT Pitchbot is the pinnacle of comedy? — that’s likely the case.
I know you said below that you wanted to avoid the “knowing” Millennial style of comedy that was too dry, and therefore prone to misinterpretation, but it still demands the reader agree with the premise that the NYT is somehow “trans-obsessed” in order to be funny (so still in the “if you get it you get it” prison you wanted to avoid):
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/magazine/banksy-and-the-problem-with-sarcastic-art.html
“There is only mockery, backed by certainty that the reader shares the author’s contempt. Sarcasm is a natural fit for partisan news aggregators, because it relies on a calculated appeal to shared attitudes.”
(“Clapter” might also be a good descriptor of that joke)
Anyway, I gotta run. Aside from that one quibble it was a very funny piece!
Thanks for this @NY Expat! I need to read that linked article again when I'm not befogged by acupuncture, but I quite agree that "sarcasm is our kitsch." Besides being a missed opportunity for authentic connection with a reader, it's also...boring. Dumb? Callow? I don't like it.
The NYT joke we're discussing does take a stand on the issue, but it's not ill-considered on my part, nor driven by a need for Clapter. It came from two sources:
1) First-hand knowledge about NYT Op-Ed after interacting with them over a period of 10-15 years (1991-2005?). Back then, they had these weird "house beliefs" that you had to navigate if you wanted any chance at selling them humor. (Yes they used to run humor.) Where did they come from? Upstairs, I suppose--or the fairly narrow pool of talent they seemed to draw from. These shibboleths were super-real, and the more Panglossian they were when it came to money and power, the more you had to step carefully. You and the editor might privately agree that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal, but joking about that in a piece would be an automatic reject.
So much to say that the folks there were very very good at what I'd call self-preservational editing within a corporate structure--"will this get me fired?"--but if you ever mentioned this, they'd immediately go into the defensive crouch of "how dare you, we are JOURNALISTS" and then after that "how dare you, we are the NEW YORK TIMES". Part of the intended subsonics of the above piece is how even liberal Boomers generally reject ownership-based critiques of institutions like The Times. But having worked with them, I think that's a completely legit way to view them--the owners do set the tone. And this is not something I judge the editors overly harshly about; those editors gotta eat. Whenever readers squawk about NYT coverage--as with Dean Baquet's kid-glove treatment of Trump--my intuition is ALWAYS that readers are perceiving the disconnect between the world the NYT is describing, and the opinions the paper must espouse. I not only think this is worth needling them over, I think it's essential now that there are so few institutional voices.
But believe it or not, I didn't have much of an opinion on the NYT/trans matter until I listened to a 90 minute podcast called "Death Panel." There were a couple of trans writers on there, and not only did their points about the Times make sense, it also sounded exactly like the institution I used to deal with. With this background informing me, I felt comfortable including that joke. Blunt but fair.
I lose concentration during a piece just like any writer, but really do try to see every piece, and ideally every joke, as an opportunity to connect with readers via my own personal experience. I don't mean to talk this to death and only am doing so because I so agree with you that most satire really IS Clapter-bait. Forty years of writing this kind of material makes me at least attempt to deliver something meatier. I'm glad you liked the piece, and thank you again for so thoughtful a response.