She was furious. Genuinely, sincerely furious, at a completely invented premise. I do not know whether to feel proud or mildly concerned.
A reader emailed our section this week, genuinely furious, convinced that a satirical piece I published last month describing an entirely fictional, deliberately absurd local ordinance was an actual, real piece of news reporting, and I have spent the days since genuinely uncertain whether this represents the single best compliment my particular brand of deadpan satirical writing has ever received, or a genuinely concerning sign that I have somehow failed at the most basic level to signal the piece’s actual satirical nature clearly enough.
The piece in question described, with the kind of straight-faced, deadpan specificity I generally favor in my own satirical writing, a fictional town council debating an entirely invented ordinance regulating something genuinely, deliberately absurd, complete with invented quotes from invented officials and invented statistics presented with total, unwavering seriousness throughout. It ran, as our section’s satirical pieces always do, clearly labeled and positioned within our publication’s well-established satire section, a placement I would have assumed made the piece’s actual nature reasonably unambiguous to any regular reader.
The reader’s email, forwarded to me by our section editor with a genuinely amused note attached, expressed real, sincere outrage at the invented ordinance, demanding to know how such an obviously unreasonable policy could possibly have been approved and asking, with what read as genuine civic concern, how she might go about organizing local opposition to it. I read the email several times, trying to determine whether there was any hint of her being in on the joke herself, some layer of irony I was simply missing, and ultimately concluded, based on the specific tone and detail of her genuine concern, that she had, in fact, entirely missed the satirical framing and taken the entire piece as straightforward factual reporting.
I think this specific experience touches on a genuinely interesting tension at the heart of the particular deadpan style I favor in my own satirical writing, a style that deliberately avoids the more obvious tonal signals, exaggerated absurdist details, explicit winks to the reader, that other satirical traditions lean on more heavily specifically to prevent exactly this kind of misreading. My own preferred approach trades some of that safety for what I believe is a genuinely funnier, sharper effect when it lands correctly, precisely because the reader has to do a bit more work themselves to recognize the satire, work that produces a considerably more satisfying payoff once the penny actually drops, but that also, apparently, occasionally fails to drop at all for a reader without sufficient context or sufficient familiarity with this specific style.
I wrote back to the reader directly, as gently and respectfully as I could manage, clarifying that the piece was satirical, positioned clearly within our publication’s satire section, and genuinely thanking her for engaging with it seriously enough to actually write in with her concerns, since I think there is something worth taking seriously in a reader’s genuine civic engagement even when it is aimed, in this specific instance, at an entirely fictional target. She wrote back, to her genuine credit, with good humor once she understood the actual nature of the piece, admitting she had simply skimmed past the section header without properly registering it.
I have been debating, since this whole exchange, whether I need to adjust my own satirical style going forward, leaning somewhat more heavily on the more obvious tonal signals I have generally avoided, or whether this single reader’s misreading is simply an acceptable, occasional cost of writing in a deliberately subtler style that, when it does land correctly, I believe produces genuinely sharper, more effective satire than a more heavily signaled version would manage. I do not think I have fully resolved that question yet, though I lean, on balance, toward preserving my current approach rather than softening it purely to prevent this kind of occasional, if genuinely memorable, misunderstanding.
I have decided, at minimum, to actually treat this whole episode as a genuinely funny story worth sharing rather than a professional embarrassment worth hiding, and I suspect, given how thoroughly my writer friends have already delighted in hearing the tale this week, that this particular reader’s furious, entirely sincere email about a fictional town ordinance is going to follow me around this industry for considerably longer than the actual piece that originally prompted it.
A colleague who writes in a considerably more broadly signaled satirical style, complete with the kind of obvious absurdist flourishes I have generally avoided, pointed out over lunch this week that she gets a version of this same reader confusion too, just considerably less often, which she takes as evidence that no amount of tonal signaling ever fully eliminates the risk entirely, only reduces its frequency somewhat. That comparison has helped me feel less uniquely responsible for this week’s specific misreading, a reminder that this is simply an ordinary, if occasionally memorable, occupational hazard of writing satire for a general readership rather than a specific personal failure of craft on my own part.
I think I will keep writing in my current style regardless, deadpan and unsignaled, because I genuinely believe the sharper effect it produces when it does land correctly is worth the occasional, genuinely entertaining cost of a furious reader demanding to know how a fictional town council could possibly have approved something this absurd.
More from this author at Violet Woolf, prat.uk.