Funny haha – The European Review of Books

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2024-12-29 00:00:04

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.