by Scott Meadow | Editor-in-chief, IRREVERENT Magazine
Monday mornings begin the same way they have for the better part of two decades: I open the submissions folder before I open anything else, including my eyes fully. There are usually forty-three emails. Forty of them are pitches. The other three are from someone named Gary who has been trying to sell me a timeshare since 2019 and whose commitment to the bit, I'll admit, I respect.
The pitches are the problem. Not because they're bad — some of them are quite good — but because by the third coffee, I can no longer tell which ones I'm reading from the submissions folder and which ones I accidentally opened from Reuters.
This is not a metaphor. This is my Monday morning.
Let me give you some examples, because the abstract version sounds like the complaint of a man who drinks too much and has opinions about it. The specific version sounds like that too, but at least it's useful.
Case One. A writer — good writer, has been with us since the last redesign — pitched a piece about a legacy Fortune 500 company launching a cologne for men "who want to smell like quarterly earnings and quiet dominance." The subhead was something like: *Notes of mahogany, suppressed empathy, and offshore accounts.* It was sharp. We assigned it. Two days before publication, a billionaire — a real one, living, breathing, insufficiently satirized by the universe — announced an actual fragrance line. Same energy. Same demographic target. Real press release, real distribution deal, real retail price point that was, somehow, more absurd than the one our writer invented.
We killed the piece. The writer took it well. I didn't. The cologne, reportedly, sold out in seventy-two hours.
Case Two. One of our staff writers spent three weeks on a piece about a Senate subcommittee convened to regulate artificial intelligence, populated by members who demonstrably did not know what artificial intelligence was. The joke — and it was a good joke — was that the subcommittee's most substantive contribution was asking a technology CEO whether "the cyber" was "in the phone or behind the phone." We'd workshopped the dialogue. We'd tuned every tin-eared question for maximum comic density.
The piece came back from fact-check with a note that said: This is real. The subcommittee is real. The questions are real. The quote about the cyber is from the public record.
I sat with that for a while. Then I had a drink. Then I sat with it some more.
Case Three is the one that still gets brought up at editorial meetings, usually by someone who thinks they're being funny. We ran a piece — ran it, published it, sent the newsletter — about a city's 311 service being replaced by an AI chatbot that responded to every complaint, regardless of content, with a haiku. Pothole on Elm Street: haiku. Noise complaint: haiku. Missing recycling bin: haiku, with seasonal imagery.
The reader response was unlike anything I'd seen. Not because they loved it. Because they were angry. Because seventeen separate readers emailed to inform us, with varying degrees of aggression, that this was already happening in their city. Not the haiku specifically. But the chatbot. The automated deflection. The poetry of non-response.
We ran a correction. I'm not sure what the hell we were correcting. The piece was fiction. The readers were right. Both things remained true.
Here's my working theory, developed over several years and one informal Slack channel we started calling #is-this-real: satire used to be amplification. You took something that was ten percent absurd and you ran it up to ninety. The distance between reality and the joke was the space where the laugh lived. Now the math has inverted. Reality is running at something like ninety percent absurd on a slow news cycle, and our job — if we're being honest about it — is deflation. We file it down to sixty percent so it reads like something a person made up rather than something that happened.
The copy desk has a flag now. It reads: Insufficient distance from fact. I had it laminated.
Three interns have left for PR in the past eighteen months. I understand. In PR, you also make things up. But the things you make up are less depressing, the health insurance is better, and nobody sends you a correction because a city in the Midwest accidentally validated your comic premise in reality.
I want to be careful here not to sound like a man delivering a eulogy for something that isn't dead yet. Satire isn't dead. Satire is fine. Satire is, in fact, having a moment — the wrong kind of moment, the kind where everyone is doing it and most of them are just angry people with Canva access, but still.
What I'm describing is something more specific: the discipline of the form. The craft of maintaining enough fictional altitude that the reader can breathe up there, can look down at the landscape of the absurd and recognize it without drowning in it. That's harder than it sounds. It requires distance. Distance requires a gap between what is and what we're pretending. The gap keeps narrowing.
And yet.
Every piece we've run that landed — the ones that made people send it to someone else, which is the only metric that matters — they worked because underneath the joke was something true. Not factually true. Structurally true. The world is not making sense, the piece said, and here is a formal demonstration. Satire, at its least stupid, is insisting that the world should make sense. Not that it does. That it should. The joke is the demand.
I still believe in that. I believe in it on Monday mornings, before the Reuters feed loads, in the narrow window between the second and third coffee when the submissions folder is still full of possibilities and Gary hasn't emailed yet about the timeshare.
Next week's column will be funnier, I promise — assuming Congress, the Vatican, and the venture capital community can all be convinced to take Tuesday off.
— The Editor.
If it's the Editor's Mess, let HIM clean it up!
Editor's Mess runs irregularly, on a schedule that reflects the editor's confidence in the future of linear time.