Satire is supposed to punch at absurdity wherever it finds it. Tonight I am discovering how much harder that principle is to hold onto when the target is something I privately believe in.
My editor pitched me an assignment today, a satirical piece poking fun at a recent policy proposal that has been generating a fair bit of public debate, and I have spent the evening genuinely wrestling with a specific professional dilemma I have not confronted quite this directly before in my career: the policy in question is one I actually, privately, substantively agree with, and I am not entirely sure I can write genuinely funny, effective satire mocking a position I do not actually think deserves mocking.
I want to be honest that this is not, on its face, an unusual request within this specific industry. Satirists are expected, as a basic condition of the job, to be able to find the genuine absurdity in almost any position or event, regardless of the writer’s own personal politics, and I have certainly written plenty of pieces over the years gently mocking positions and figures I hold no strong personal feelings about either way. What feels genuinely different about tonight’s specific assignment is being asked to satirize something I actually, sincerely believe is correct, a request that sits considerably closer to being asked to argue against my own genuine convictions than the more comfortable, neutral satirical assignments I usually take on without a second thought.
I spent a good part of this evening trying to actually find the legitimate satirical angle here, since even positions I broadly agree with can genuinely contain real absurdities worth gently mocking, poorly worded provisions, questionable messaging choices by the policy’s own advocates, procedural oddities in how it has actually been debated publicly. That kind of satire, aimed at execution and messaging rather than at the underlying substance of a position I actually believe in, feels considerably more honest and considerably more within my own comfortable professional range than satire that would require me to actually mock the core idea itself.
I drafted a version along exactly those lines this evening, focused on some genuinely clumsy public messaging around the policy rather than the underlying substance, and sent it to my editor along with an honest note explaining my own specific hesitation about writing anything that mocked the actual core proposal rather than its considerably more mockable rollout and messaging. She responded quickly and, I thought, genuinely graciously, saying she had not actually considered that my own personal view on the underlying policy might create this kind of tension, and that the version I drafted, focused on messaging rather than substance, worked perfectly well for what she actually needed from the piece.
I think this whole exchange has left me wanting to be somewhat more proactive going forward about flagging this kind of tension earlier in the assignment process, rather than simply accepting a pitch and then privately wrestling with it alone for an entire evening before eventually finding a version I can write honestly. I suspect I am not the only satirist who occasionally gets assigned a target they privately, substantively agree with, and I think there is real professional value in being upfront about that specific conflict early, rather than either quietly writing something that betrays my own genuine convictions or quietly resenting an assignment I never voiced any actual concern about accepting in the first place.
I do not think satire requires a writer to hold no genuine political convictions of their own, an impossible standard I do not think any working satirist actually meets in practice regardless of how neutral their public byline might read. What I do think it requires is real, ongoing honesty about exactly where those convictions sit relative to any given assignment, and a genuine willingness to either find the legitimate satirical angle that does not betray them, as I managed tonight, or to say plainly, as I nearly ended up needing to, that a specific assignment simply is not one I can write honestly.
Tonight’s piece is filed, and I think it is genuinely funny without asking me to mock something I actually believe in. I am counting that as a good outcome, even though getting there required considerably more internal wrestling than most of my assignments typically demand, and I suspect this specific tension, between satirical craft and genuine personal conviction, is one I will keep encountering throughout the rest of this career, however carefully I try to flag it earlier next time around.
I think there is a broader, genuinely useful lesson in tonight’s specific resolution, that satire aimed at execution and messaging rather than at underlying substance is often not just the more comfortable choice for a writer navigating exactly this kind of personal conflict, but frequently the sharper, more genuinely effective satire regardless, since messaging failures and procedural absurdities are, in my own considerable experience, usually easier to write convincingly funny material about than a piece that tries to argue an entire underlying position is inherently ridiculous, a considerably harder, more polemical kind of writing that I am not sure genuinely counts as satire in the same sense at all.
I am going to propose, at some point soon, that our section actually build a bit more room into the standard assignment process for exactly this kind of upfront flag, a quick, low-stakes check where a writer can note a potential personal conflict with a given target before spending an entire evening privately wrestling with it alone the way I did tonight. I suspect I am not the only satirist on staff who has quietly navigated this exact tension without ever raising it directly, and I think a small, structural fix here could save considerably more evenings like tonight’s than my own single, individual resolution ever will on its own.
More from this author at Violet Woolf, prat.uk.