Writing Topical Satire Quickly
How to turn around a piece in 2.5 hours on a Sunday night
My cat loves it when I write topical satire — not because she’s a fan of social commentary — but because it means she has a warm lap to curl up on at two o’clock in the morning when my wife and I would normally be asleep. It’s a ritual I enjoy too. My wife is our cat’s clear favorite, and, if given a choice between the two of us, sits in her lap nine times out of ten. So the nights I’m up late writing are some of the few times our cat cuddles with me, nestling her body in between my thighs and looking up at me expectantly until I scratch her head. I guess, in her mind, a bony lap is better than no lap at all.
[EDIT: As I’m writing this, my wife is on a work call with the door closed, so by incredible coincidence (or feline intuition) the cat has hopped into my lap instead and fallen asleep. This NEVER happens during the day.]
That was more or less the setup last night (2:00am, wife asleep, cat in lap) as I typed out a short satirical piece that ran in McSweeney’s this afternoon. The piece is the second time I’ve written about the Supreme Court in the last few months, the first one coming out shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action. Pending miraculous changes of heart, I have a feeling the court’s conservative justices will continue to do satire-worthy things for the foreseeable future — the grift that keeps on grifting, so to speak.
I’d also taught my quarterly topical satire workshop, Finding the Humor in the Horrible, the day before through WritingWorkshops.com. I love teaching topical satire since it’s the comedy medium I find myself gravitating to most often, and it’s therapeutic to read over the week’s horrible news with other writers and brainstorm ways to make fun of the people doing the horrible things. This time around we looked at a story about a school district in Texas that suspended a Black student for his hairstyle (despite a law in Texas specifically designed to prevent that kind of racially-targeted discrimination). The conversation turned into a broader discussion about how Texas seems to be heading in the wrong direction in virtually every way. It felt good to bash the people in power in my home state and take them down a peg, even if just in our collective minds.
One of the questions that comes up most often in my workshops is how to turn around topical satire quickly, since our ever-shortening news cycle means that the morning’s scandals can sometimes feel like yesterday’s news by lunchtime. So I thought I’d talk a little bit about what the process looks like for me.
But, before I do that, a quick update on what’s going on with me. First of all, sorry it’s been a while! My bimonthly newsletter has been turning into a bimonthly newsletter (the other kind) recently. But once things settle down with my book, I’m hoping to post more often. Speaking of which, Spoilers is finally done! The book has been shipped (with a few exceptions I’m still trying to track down) to all of the crowdfunding campaign supporters, and people are loving it so far! The book will be available to the public on October 2nd wherever you get your books, including your local independent bookstore (if you order it online through their website). That said, there are three things that would be massively helpful for getting the word out about the book:
If you’ve read and enjoyed the book, please give it a review on Goodreads. As the old theater joke goes: If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends about it. If you didn’t enjoy the show, you’re wrong!
Please request that your local library purchase a copy of the book. This helps other people access the book, and helps me get the book out in front of more people. I’ve put together links to request forms on my website for some of the biggest library systems in the U.S. (apologies if yours isn’t on the list!)
Lastly, if you’re in New York, come to my book launch party on October 23rd at Caveat! There will be readings and stand-up from some amazing writers and comics as well as a Q&A. It’ll be a fun time and I’d love to see you there so we can hang in person!
I feel very uncomfortable promoting my work, so you can imagine that marketing a self-published book hasn’t been easy for me (I’ll likely write a post, or several, about that soon) but I am incredibly grateful for your help!
Okay, back to topical satire!
Normally, when I’m writing a topical satire piece, it’s because I’ve seen a headline that day that catches my attention (e.g. makes me incredibly fucking furious) and I decide to write about it that evening. Particularly for McSweeney’s, it helps to get pieces in to their timely queue by no later than first thing the next morning after the story breaks (news cycles fast, attention spans short, etc.)
So when I came across a story while browsing Twitter late Sunday night about Clarence Thomas attending Koch Brothers fundraisers, I knew I’d need to get a piece to McSweeney’s by Monday morning if it was going to have a shot at running. Because, by Tuesday, we’d all be talking about something else (Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelce, as it turns out).
I usually spend about 5-6 hours working on a given satire piece. I’ll typically start right after the workday ends, and read as many articles as possible about the story at hand in order to gather as much material as possible to later spin jokes out of. After about an hour or two of fact gathering, I’ll then spend another hour or so thinking about how that news story makes me feel and what possible premises might convey that feeling. Once I’ve landed on a premise, I’ll jot down as many facets of the story that come to mind as I can and look for possible parallels that could work as jokes for the premise I’ve chosen (T-charts can be helpful for this as I’ve written about here). Finally, once I have all of my ideas down, I narrow down to my strongest jokes and shape the piece around those jokes.
Last night, I had to shrink my 5-6 hour process down to 2 hours if I was going to have any hope of being vaguely functional the next day. So I was going to have to take some shortcuts.
Where normally I would spend time trying to think of as many premises as possible before picking the strongest, I instead had to roll with the first premise that came to mind that seemed like it might work. To get to this first “good enough” idea, I wrote down what popped into my head first when I thought about the Koch Brothers, as well as the Supreme Court. Essentially, I was doing a mini T-chart in my head.
When I thought about the Koch Brothers, one of the first things that came to mind was the research center named after them at my alma mater. I’ve long been bothered by how many universities have cozy ties with oil and gas companies, defense contractors, and other such corporations.
With that in mind, I thought about what ways the Supreme Court might be similar to universities. They’re both dependent on federal funding, they’re both venerated institutions, and they both shouldn’t be swayed by special interests but are. So that seemed like a solid starting point for writing about the Supreme Court. Good enough.
From there, I looked for possible aspects of university funding that might map to the Supreme Court. First was renaming things, since so many universities rename buildings or departments after wealthy donors. Koch Center for Justice. Done.
The second was how university faculty positions are often sponsored by (and named after) donors — a practice I’ve always found incredibly bizarre. Thus, Associate Justice became The Heritage Foundation Associate Justice for Textualism and Post-Racial Policy (basically taking the format of how faculty positions are named and finding donors and areas of focus that felt appropriate for a given justice).
Finally, I thought about how universities are constantly upgrading their campus facilities to compete with other schools, so I brainstormed what an upgraded courtroom might look like (fancier chairs). I found a floor plan, and when I saw that there was a press section, I thought that might be a way to work in a jab at right wing media, because why not? I quickly outlined the piece, wrote a draft with those jokes in mind, punched it up a little bit, and sent it off to McSweeney’s at 3:30am (very late, but not the latest I’ve stayed up writing something). The cat was in my lap for approximately 70% of that time (when she wasn’t jumping off my lap every time I shifted my legs a fraction of an inch).
Part of the reason I was able to turn the piece around relatively quickly was because the premise I picked drew material from a topic I’d already thought a lot about (university donations). So I already had a lot of ideas that were relatively top of mind and, luckily, mapped well to the topic I was trying to satirize. I also dug up several emails about new faculty positions, department renamings, and other donation announcements that my alma mater periodically sends to alumni. That made my job even easier, as I could essentially co-opt that language and, with the donation announcement format in mind, use those emails as a template for the piece.
Overall, I was satisfied with it, especially having cranked it out in the wee hours of the morning. I think my cat was satisfied with it too.