This Week’s Most Uncomfortable Comedy

The Uncomfortable Truth About Modern Satire

Let me tell you what keeps me up at night: I’ll write what I think is an exaggerated, absurd satirical piece, and within 48 hours, reality will do something worse. I wrote a piece about politicians ignoring climate change by pretending it’s just “warm weather season.” Two days later, a senator actually said something nearly identical in a committee hearing.

When your satire becomes predictive rather than imaginative, something’s broken. Either I’m getting too good at this, or reality is getting too stupid. I’m betting on option two.

This Week’s Satirical Highlights: Reality’s Greatest Hits

The Avocado Empire Strikes Back

Hannah Miller’s piece about Super Bowl Sunday being controlled by Big Avocado works because it’s barely satire. We DO consume 139 million pounds of avocados during one football game. That’s not made up – that’s documented American excess.

What makes this uncomfortable is how little Miller had to exaggerate. She took real consumption data, added “avocado cartels,” and suddenly you’re reading something that feels like it could be a Bloomberg investigative report. The satire isn’t in inventing an absurd world – it’s in accurately describing the absurd world we already live in.

I remember when satire required imagination. Now it requires observation skills and the willingness to state obvious things that everyone agreed to ignore. Progress, I guess.

When Medical Solutions Meet Information Warfare

Adéla Novotný’s Truth Vaccine piece hit me harder than it should have. The concept – immunizing people against fake news through pharmaceutical intervention – should be obviously satirical. Should be.

But I read it and thought “would that actually work though?” That’s the problem with satire in 2025 – the absurd solutions sound plausible because the problems are so insane. We’ve normalized information warfare to the point where “vaccine against lies” doesn’t immediately register as comedy.

Novotný nailed the dark comedy of our situation: we’ve collectively lost the ability to distinguish truth from fiction, so maybe the solution IS medical rather than educational. The piece makes you laugh, then makes you consider whether it’s actually satirical or accidentally prescriptive.

The Manila Files: Economic Anxiety Meets Milk Tea

Carla Reyes wrote about economists panicking because poor Filipinos won’t buy ₱2,000 milk tea, and honestly, I had to check if it was satire or straight reporting. The absurdity – expecting people without money to spend money they don’t have to save an economy designed to extract what little they do have – is so close to real economic discourse that the satire is almost invisible.

That’s brilliant and depressing in equal measure. Reyes captured the essence of trickle-down economics by applying it to bubble tea. The joke writes itself because the underlying logic is already nonsensical. She just made it explicit.

This is what good satire does in 2025 – it doesn’t create fictional absurdity, it clarifies existing absurdity. Reyes took real economic attitudes, removed the euphemisms, and showed the cruel logic underneath. That’s harder than inventing scenarios, and more important.

Brussels Gets Egged: When Protest Becomes Performance Art

Hannah Miller’s piece about farmers determining EU policy through egg-throwing championships should be ridiculous. Should be. But farmer protests ARE getting increasingly theatrical, bureaucrats ARE increasingly disconnected, and the gap between agricultural reality and regulatory fantasy IS widening.

Miller took that reality and pushed it one step further – from theatrical protest to literal tournament. The satire isn’t “what if farmers protested?” It’s “what if the protest’s absurdity was honest about being absurd?” She made implicit theater explicit.

What This Week Taught Me About Satire’s New Reality

After reviewing this week’s pieces, I’m convinced satire has fundamentally changed. We’re not in the business of inventing absurdity anymore. We’re in the business of revealing absurdity that’s already there but everyone agreed to treat as normal.

The satirist’s job in 2025: Notice what everyone else has normalized. Point at it. Add just enough exaggeration to break the spell of normalization. Watch people realize “wait, that IS insane.” That’s the whole job now.

The Uncomfortable Questions

Here’s what keeps me up: If reality is already satirical, what’s the point of satire? If the absurd is normal, does pointing out absurdity even matter? Can comedy change anything when everyone’s already laughing at the apocalypse?

I don’t have good answers. But I keep writing anyway because satire serves a different purpose now – not to imagine alternate realities, but to help people see the reality they’re in. That’s valuable, maybe more valuable than entertainment.

The Pieces That Almost Worked

Not everything this week hit the mark. Some satirical attempts fell flat because they tried to be traditional satire in a post-satire world. The piece about scientific justifications for messiness failed because it wasn’t absurd enough – people actually make those arguments sincerely.

When your satire is indistinguishable from real content people believe, you haven’t written satire. You’ve written unintentional documentation of human self-delusion. That’s the tightrope we walk now – being absurd enough to be obviously satirical while being grounded enough to be recognizable.

The Manila Parent Piece: Cultural Specificity vs. Universal Truth

Lourdes Tiu’s article about Filipino parents refusing to express approval demonstrates another challenge: using cultural specificity without becoming a stereotype factory. The piece works for people who lived that experience but doesn’t transcend to become universal commentary.

Great satire should work on multiple levels – specific enough to be authentic, universal enough to apply broadly. When satire only works for in-group recognition, it’s failed at least half its job. Recognition without insight is just nostalgia, not satire.

Looking Forward: Satire in an Already-Satirical World

I don’t know what satire looks like in five years. If reality keeps escalating, maybe we’ll need new forms entirely. Maybe satire becomes pure documentation with formatting changes. Maybe we stop distinguishing between news and comedy because they’ve fully merged.

What I do know: As long as people are willing to normalize the abnormal, satirists will have jobs pointing out the normalization. As long as systems are absurd, someone needs to say “this is absurd” clearly enough that people hear it. That’s our role, for better or worse.

Resources for Understanding Modern Satire

• Super Bowl Avocado Piece – Study how to satirize consumption
• Truth Vaccine Article – Example of dark satire done right
• Manila Milk Tea Economics – How to satirize inequality
• Brussels Egg Tournament – Visual satire techniques
• Society for Online Satire – Community and resources