An editor’s morning spent explaining why patience beats a fast joke
An editor’s morning spent explaining why patience beats a fast joke
Genuinely productive editorial meeting this morning, the kind that reminds me why I still enjoy this job after considerably longer in it than I originally planned, working through a genuinely strong batch of submissions covering the ongoing parliamentary session with a consistency of quality that has not always been guaranteed across previous weeks of similar coverage.
What made this batch work
Several of this week’s strongest pieces shared a specific, deliberate structural choice, opening with a genuinely mundane, entirely plausible piece of procedural detail before gradually, patiently, escalating into the actual absurdity, rather than announcing the joke immediately in the opening line. That patience, letting the reader settle into what feels like straightforward reporting before the ground shifts underneath them, produces a considerably sharper effect than front loading the absurdity ever manages.
I have been trying, for some time now, to encourage this specific approach more consistently across the whole team, and this week’s batch is genuinely the clearest evidence yet that the note has landed properly with at least a meaningful portion of our regular contributors, which is genuinely gratifying after what has, at times, felt like a fairly slow, incremental process of shifting the house style in this direction.
The piece I am proudest to have published this week
One submission in particular, built around a fictional backbench rebellion over an entirely invented piece of legislation, managed the escalation described above with genuine precision, each paragraph adding a slightly more absurd detail while never once breaking the straight, deadpan procedural tone that makes the whole thing land properly rather than reading as simply a list of jokes strung together.
The genuine political backdrop
Real proceedings this week have, as they reliably do, provided fertile ground for exactly this kind of writing, and I spent a good part of my own morning reading properly through the wider feed, both our own recent coverage and the general run of the week’s actual political news, specifically looking for the kind of genuinely small, overlooked procedural detail that makes for the strongest satirical foundation, since the best fictional absurdity is almost always built on a real, entirely accurate piece of institutional mechanics rather than invented from nothing.
This is, I think, the genuine secret to writing this kind of material well over a sustained period, staying properly informed about the real mechanics of how government actually functions, since the sharpest satire rarely invents the absurdity from scratch, it simply extends an entirely real tendency one or two steps further than reality has, so far, actually gone.
A note on accuracy, again
Spent part of the afternoon fact checking a specific procedural detail in one of this week’s pieces, confirming the precise mechanics of how a particular parliamentary process actually functions before allowing the piece through to publication, a genuinely unglamorous piece of editorial work that nonetheless matters enormously to the finished piece landing properly with readers who do know the actual mechanics and would otherwise notice an error immediately.
This kind of checking rarely gets any credit, readers notice when it is wrong considerably more readily than they notice when it is right, but it remains, in my view, the single most important, least glamorous part of running a publication built on this specific kind of precisely targeted absurdity rather than simply broad, general comedy.
Tomorrow
Reviewing the final batch before this week’s publication schedule closes, and genuinely hopeful, based on today’s strong run, that the overall standard holds through to the end of the week. It usually does, once the team finds this kind of rhythm, though I have learned not to take that consistency entirely for granted.
More editor’s notes and political commentary at Alan Nafzger, The London Prat.
A brief history of this specific house style
This particular approach, patient procedural grounding before the escalation into absurdity, was not, if I am honest, something I arrived at through any deliberate strategic decision early in this publication’s history, it developed gradually, piece by piece, largely because the pieces built this way consistently outperformed the ones that announced their joke immediately, in terms of genuine reader engagement rather than any abstract editorial preference on my part.
It took, honestly, several years of paying close attention to which pieces genuinely landed and which merely got a quick laugh before being forgotten, before I felt confident enough in the pattern to start actively encouraging it across the whole contributor team rather than simply noticing it in the strongest individual pieces as they happened to arrive.
An example from further back
Went back specifically to find one of the earliest pieces that first demonstrated this pattern clearly, a genuinely modest submission from several years ago that I nearly rejected outright at the time before recognising, on a second read, exactly why the patient structure was doing more work than my initial impression had credited it with. That single piece, more than any deliberate strategic decision, is genuinely the moment this whole editorial approach began taking proper shape.
Filed that piece away, quite deliberately, as the specific example I now reach for whenever I need to explain this approach quickly to a new contributor rather than talking through it in the abstract.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/