Happy April Fools’ Day! You are reading an article written for our April Fools’ edition of the newspaper, The Deceiver. This is a work of satire.
Earlier today, a local satire article was found discussing a Pertinent Topic About the World. The article did an excellent job of describing the Pertinent Topic About the World in a dumbed-down and shallow manner, glossing over the nuances and cherry-picking the details.
The article employed many tricks in this oversimplification, using clever remarks, sarcastic phrases and blunt statements to highlight the main issues of the Pertinent Topic About the World. One thing that this article fell short on, however, was a solution to the Pertinent Topic About the World. In other words, this article failed to provide anything of value.
In a result that surprises nobody, it turns out that while satire does touch on truths about the world around us, it also offers absolutely nothing in terms of a solution. It provides ample opportunity for the author to show off a tongue-in-cheek opinion. It enables them to yammer on about a ridiculous idea gone too far. However, in the larger picture, these things are worthless.
We interviewed a satire writer with the hopes to elucidate the value of satire. “Who doesn’t like the status of being a pseudo-intellectual?“ replied Joe Bernstein, a satirist for The Retriever. “You get to seem intelligent without doing anything an intelligent person does.” When prompted about what intelligent people do, he replied, “they do things for the world.” Unsurprisingly, he had no reason as to why satire mattered outside of his own egocentric fantasies.
While Joe Bernstein is the least of all satire writers, this trend holds true for even the greats. Unlike other types of articles that arguably provide raw facts, satire does none of that. One can obtain as much information from a blank piece of paper as they can from an entire paper filled with satire. The only difference is that staring at a blank piece of paper does not trick the viewer into thinking they are expanding their mind.
While satire articles provide very few positives, they do boast a wealth of negative impacts. Satire articles perpetuate the false belief that cynicism is a useful manner of communication. Rather than trying to fix the problem in a genuine manner, satire offers a means to use laughter to ignore the problem as it continues to spiral out of control.
Satire also acts as an excellent tool to cause chaos and upset. In an imperfect world where common sense is a commodity, people often times have extreme reactions to satire. So much so, in fact, that disclaimers are needed to alert the reader that what they are reading is untrue.
Almost even more ridiculous than such a disclaimer, though, is the fact a newspaper would even consider publishing something untrue to begin with.
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