Bold choice to write a satire in 2026 is a sentiment I’ve come across more than once lately. Boldness is inherent in the act of writing satire, and always has been. But in the context of the present moment, what I take this to mean is that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to outdo for artistic effect the absurdity of our current socio-political reality.
In other words: satire is dead.
It is true that a writers’ room might struggle to comically exaggerate the events of the last week alone. The President of the United States shared an AI-generated image that appeared to depict him as Jesus Christ. When this evoked accusations of blasphemy among Christians, he backtracked, claiming he thought the image showed him as a doctor and “had to do with the Red Cross.”
Later, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters it was “a doctored image,” the use of the word doctored raising the possibility that Trump misheard her instructions on how to respond, something straight out of an SNL sketch involving a group of senior citizens playing a game of telephone—where the consequence of such a misunderstanding is nuclear war. Hard to beat, and yet the week before, at the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump spoke darkly about the war with Iran before a crowd of children, flanked by a person in an Easter Bunny costume.
How, then, would a satire keep up, especially given the glacial pace of publishing?
Lucky, then, that the satirist has other glinting blades of varying shapes and sizes in the Swiss Army Knife they use to flay the powerful. I know because—and this is where I reveal my vested interest in satire not being dead—I just published my debut novel The Scoop, a satire of a once-respected journalist slumming it as night editor at a sleazy tabloid, and how far she’ll go, how much she’s willing to lose, to reclaim her rightful place in the media elite.
When I sat down back in the spring of 2018 and began working on the manuscript that would eventually become (after many wrong-turns and dead ends) The Scoop, I was drawing on my own experiences on the clickbait factory assembly line. If you checked my Instagram profile back then, you would have seen bylines for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Man Repeller (if anyone remembers that one), and photos from press trips to Miami, LA, and Las Vegas.
What I didn’t make public was that, because commissions from those sorts of publications were infrequent, and not very well paid when they did come, I also worked in tabloid newsrooms, churning out a dozen or more clickbait articles each shift on such journalistically important topics as the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass and whether it was looking bigger or smaller that week, tenuous claims about Meghan and Harry from shady Twitter accounts, and oddities reported in small town papers across the US that ranged from the amusing to the deeply disturbing.
(The Scoop is fiction, but I did sneak a couple of inspired-by-real-life moments into the book, like the time I was asked to call the sheriff of a small town in the South to confirm a story reported in the local paper that a man had been charged with bestiality after security footage at the egg farm where he worked showed him assaulting a chicken. The sheriff, after confirming the details, invited me to come down and investigate the story, suggesting we grab dinner, the most unusual circumstances in which someone has tried to hit on me, by far. Another time, I was told “no” after suggesting we cover the news that the Philippines was on track to run out of water. I had the sense that some cosmic joke was being played on me as I reluctantly put my initials next to the latest story about Kim Kardashian’s ass on the “news” list.)
Back then, I knew that the click-dependent digital media machine, which by necessity of survival prioritized content that appealed to our baser instincts—things that shock, enrage, frighten, or arouse—would never voluntarily slow down, but keep speeding up until the wheels came off. How, then, would a satire keep up, especially given the glacial pace of publishing? The most obvious answer was that the story, on a deeper level, needed to be timeless, a tale of a desperate person facing moral dilemmas of increasing extremity while trying to hold fast to their values.
But perhaps the question remains: What is the point of satire in 2026? Can satire really change anything?
I’d argue that much of the humor in James, Percival Everett’s National Book Award winning retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, comes not from exaggeration so much as juxtaposition. We see the Black enslaved characters switching back and forth between speaking articulately amongst themselves, then putting on a dumbed-down dialect around the white characters, highlighting the absurdity of the lie that enabled American slavery, and the literary stereotypes and tropes that helped to legitimize it. The comedy—and genius—is in the contrast; the white supremacist lie of superiority disintegrates like tissue paper every time the Black characters wearily switch to a performance of intellectual inferiority when in the presence of a white character, lest they bruise a fragile ego, and suffer the dangerous consequences likely to come with it.
Another technique, common in works of dark comedy, is something I think of as misapplied seriousness. In the fictional tabloid newsroom depicted in The Scoop, the tyrannical editor in chief, David Brown, regularly treats breaking “news” about celebrities with the kind of urgency other, more respectable publications would reserve for the outbreak of war, or a plane crash. Frankie, the protagonist, is verbally eviscerated on the phone by David one night when she suggests some photos of Meryl Streep at the beach could wait until the morning, since it is almost 2AM, and the team is covering the news that hundreds of civilians are believed dead in a bomb attack in Somalia.
The absurdity of the tabloid newsroom is plain for the reader to see without anything needing to be exaggerated (note my earlier anecdote about the Philippines running out of water), instead relying on the reader’s own understanding of logic, or sense of morality, to skewer the darkness and absurdity of tabloids—and other newsrooms that have increasingly adopted tabloid practices to compete for clicks in the attention economy.
But perhaps the question remains: What is the point of satire in 2026? Can satire really change anything? Isn’t it a limp, almost quaint kind of protest when people are lighting warehouses on fire to call attention to unlivable wages, and lobbing Molotov cocktails at, so far, a Tesla HQ and Sam Altman’s house?
I’m not sure anyone who has ever written a satire, except perhaps for the most naïve or idealistic, genuinely thought their story would result in any change as tangible as, say, forcing a corrupt official out of office. And I’m not sure the role of satire, now, is even to inform the public, as it was in the age when “savage indignation” lacerated Jonathan Swift’s heart, now that we have access to more information than most of us know what to do with.
Except perhaps for those rare and fortunate circumstances when a satire gains enough momentum to be read by a wide enough audience to penetrate public discourse, the kind of change satire makes has always been at the level of the individual. Satire as catharsis, as release valve for pent up anxiety and rage, as reminder of the existence of other sane minds in insane times, as opportunity to humbly reflect on our complicity in the systems we participate in—for audience and artist both.
In The Suffering Channel, David Foster Wallace’s novella-length short story critiquing mass media, journalist Skip Atwater, who writes a column called “What In The World” for the fictional Style magazine, is sent to cover a story about a Midwestern artist whose poop supposedly comes out shaped like famous artefacts. (Atwater works in the World Trade Center, and the deadline for is piece is September 10, 2001—a brutal framing that makes the utter meaninglessness of Atwater’s assignment all the more horrifying).
Wallace weaves the silly, lurid details of the poop-art story in a way so that as a reader, you find yourself wondering what’s really going on there. So it lands about as gently as a punch to the face when you realize you are caught up in the meaningless spectacle Atwater, Style, and the media industry generally is increasingly serving up instead of substance. You are complicit.
A Soren Kierkegaard quote I came across a few years into writing, in The Present Age, his unnervingly prescient 1846 essay on mass media, became one of two epigraphs for The Scoop (the other is from Janet Malcom’s The Journalist and the Murderer):
“The public is unrepentant, for it is not they who own the dog—they only subscribe. They neither set the dog on anyone, nor whistle it off—directly. If asked they would say: the dog is not mine, it has no master. And if the dog, had to be killed they would say: it really was a good thing that bad-tempered dog was put down, everyone wanted it killed—even the subscribers.”
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The Scoop by Erin Van Der Meer is available from Grand Central Publishing.
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