Hey – Jamie here.
It's been a dislocating fortnight.
By popular demand, find your guide to writing satire inside. The guide builds on the workshop I attended with the ex-head writer of The Onion. Use it to sharpen your comedy and charisma.
Today is also Father's Day. My intention was to write about my dad but last week, my Nana Bapa – my mum's dad – passed away. The news, the funeral, and the burial reopened some tender wounds. Though I also got to reminisce about childhood trips to Toronto where we would stay with my mum's family.
I wanted to honour my Nana Bapa by telling you about him. Getting the words out, however, has been a struggle. So I thought I would pause, let the dust settle, and share a story in the next edition about his incredible, but turbulent life.
Table of Contents
- Shaken
- Articles & Guides
- Favourite Finds
- The Darkroom
Shaken
I've been feeling somewhere between a snow globe and a jar of water and settling dirt. It's the second Father's Day without my dad and I've been trucking on, getting back into the rhythm of work, looking after myself, and feeling a bit lighter. I even returned to the gym, which was particularly monumental as when you're surrounded by chaos, it's hard to feel at ease doing something that looks after yourself.
It's not a fancy gym, which makes it feel utopian. There aren't any eucalyptus-scented towels, chakra charging points, or fingerprint-activated dumbbells. You arrive, find an unbroken locker, and get on with it. The lack of frills makes me feel calm. You don't have to perform in a way that just isn't who you are and how you're feeling that day. My personal inspiration is the guy who rocks up in his pyjamas and sandals.
We've given cameras and surveillance a backstage all-access pass to so many facets of our lives. It's nasty, living in a panopticon, instagrammifying so many bits of ourselves – but this little gym is liberated ground, remaining uncurdled by influencers. People can be cringe without consequence, let their faces turn pink, and accept that they're works in progress rather than some polished and packaged pieces of content.
'We haven't seen you in a while. Did you get injured?'
Yeah, the gym manager was right. I'd skipped the gym for almost a year. At the end of each month I'd be full of hope, but then get overwhelmed, stay at home, and feel like an idiot as another month of membership would get extracted from my bank account.
'Yeah, too much emotional damage. My dad passed away and I've been feeling too sad, but I'm back now.'
I'm not sure why I told him. I think I learned from mum's passing that every time I skirt around or lie about the reality of things, it cuts at me. Like I'm rejecting a part of myself and leaving it out to rot.
I've become better at accepting stuff, which means fewer things left on the floor to trip me up. But it's a minefield, especially when another funeral comes along and you're writing another eulogy for the sixth loved one you thought would be here forever. That's when I feel like the jar of water and dirt. I've had some calm, things look clear, but then I get shaken up and tons of mess is thrown in my eyes.
Thankfully, I've also started to feel like a snow globe. When I see my friends with their newborn son, hear a song I used to dance to in the back of mum's car, or recognise a familiar smile on a stranger's face – all that stuff gives me a big old shake, and suddenly I'm lost in a swirl of snowflakes.
'I'm sorry to hear that mate. Wait. Let me just check on something. You can go on, I'll try to find you later.'
I didn't see him again during that visit, but when I got home my phone chimed.
It was a refund for every month I missed while I was waiting for the storm to pass and an email from the manager, 'Welcome back. Hope this helps'.
Feel free to reply to this message or share your questions, requests, and favourite finds here.
Jamie | @JamoeMills
☀️ From a scorcher of a Father's Day in London
Find a better way to solve problems that matter.
P.S. I'm off to see my sister this Father's Day. The grass needs mowing and I think we'll give dad a balloon.
Articles & Guides
How To Write Satire: A Practical Guide To Being Funny
At a glance
Based on the reader question: 'I want to write something funny and sharp about the world. Where do I start?'
- Satire is your friend. It can be funny, but it’s mostly about making precise observations about the world where the joke is the sauce and the message is the pasta.
- Every good satirical piece starts in the same place: a target, a take, and an angle. If these are fuzzy, no amount of wit will save you.
- Once you know what you want to say, you can reach for the nine ‘funny filters’ to flavour your message: irony, character, shock, hyperbole, reference, madcap, parody, analogy, and misplaced focus.
Note: This article grew out of a satire writing workshop with a former head writer at The Onion. Where a specific idea comes from that workshop or Scott Dikkers’ ‘funny filters’ framework, it is credited. The piece also includes some adult humour; proceed accordingly.
Introduction
Satire is about delivering a message that draws attention to something silly, foolish, or monstrous that you believe should be challenged and changed. Comedic devices like irony, exaggeration, and shock are ways of packaging that message so it hooks, connects, and stays in the reader’s head.
Being memorable is also dangerous, which is why the powerful so often try to control, buy, or silence satirists. Satire is never just a joke; it’s a thought-provoking challenge to the status quo, which makes it a skill worth learning.
Whether your goal is to be more engaging, invoke change, or both, let’s get into how to write something sharp and funny about the world: a piece for your newsletter, an article for a satirical publication, or a few hard hitters for your wedding speech.
We’ll look at how satire works, the common missteps that break it, and a workflow for producing fresh material inspired by The Onion, the long-running US satirical newspaper. They're home to headlines like:
- 'CIA Realises It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years'
- 'World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent'
- 'L’Oreal Suspends Production Of Irresistible 2-Step Lip Color Stick After Lab Rat Seduces Way Out Of Facility'
By the end, you’ll have a process for creating your own headlines and a starting point for turning the best of them into full pieces.
Favourite finds
Things worth passing along.
Do you have a favourite find (ideas, books, quotes, purchases, etc.)? Share it here.
The Lion King 2 – We Are One (song)
As a boy, sitting cross-legged on the carpet and pressing play on The Lion King VHS, my head would swirl with my mum's stories of growing up in Tanzania: lions and elephants, Swahili phrases, sun-sweetened fruits, and barbecued meats during Eid. But when Mufasa eclipsed the screen with his majestic roar, I always thought of the family patriarch, Nana Bapa.
For this year's Father's Day, and in light of my Nana Bapa passing on, I wanted to share one of my favourite songs from The Lion King 2.
How Are Memories Stored Inside Your Brain? (video)
Every time you recall a memory, your brain reopens it, edits it slightly, and files it back. Weirdly, the ones you revisit the most have drifted the furthest from what actually happened…
Kurzgesagt explain the whole thing in thirteen minutes, making it a charming complement to the season on memory I’ve been working on. Watch here.
11 Mac apps worth installing (tech)
Usually I skip these, but MacVince has done a great job of curating 11 solid Mac apps in ten minutes. Every app is either free or a reasonable, one-off fee. My five favourites from his list are:
- GrandPerspective – Shows your hard drive as a visual map of blocks. Brilliant for hunting down the files eating your storage. Free (unlike CleanMyMac…)
- Loop – A slick pie-wheel for snapping windows into any layout you like. Free and open source.
- Outpost – A launcher that sits quietly until you need it, then surfaces your apps, files, and links fast.
- Dockside – Turns the dead space around your dock into a temporary holding bay for files mid-task.
- Plash – Set a live website as your desktop wallpaper. A clock, a weather map, a metrics dashboard, whatever you like.
Candide – Voltaire (satirical book)
I inherited my late uncle's book collection and have been slowly working through it. Candide was the last one I read and, well, Voltaire is a funny guy.
Published in 1759, when Voltaire was 65 and already a wanted man across Europe for his attacks on the Church and the French crown, Candide is a short, savage satire. His target was the fashionable philosophical optimism of the day: we live, despite all evidence to the contrary, in 'the best of all possible worlds'.
The book was banned on publication. It’s now considered his masterpiece, short enough to finish in an afternoon, and will give you a chuckle.
In defence of audiobooks (observation)
Before television, before radio, Victorian families would gather in the evenings and take turns reading novels aloud to each other. Dickens wrote with this in mind: his dialogue, his phonetic spellings, his punctuation were all shaped for the ear as much as the eye.
That is an audiobook, and that's how stories were passed down long before books existed.
So the next time you feel embarrassed, or have someone tell you that listening doesn't count, you can point out that silent reading alone is historically rather recent.
A meta-analysis of 46 studies across 65 years also found no significant difference in comprehension between reading and listening. The researcher behind it, Clinton-Lisell, put it neatly: ‘It is not at all cheating to listen as opposed to read.’ You can check out the study here.
The Darkroom
Things I've seen.
