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Humor Writing
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Citizens Untied: Parody in the Age of Corporate Media

by | January 15th, 2013

For 20 years now I’ve been locked in a test of wills with corporate publishing, trying to produce books that are just as funny as TV and movies. That should be possible, right? One would think. Sometimes I win (international bestseller), sometimes they do (they commission books, then don’t pay me). I tell myself it’s David versus Goliath…but it’s probably just Joe Versus the Volcano.

Comedy being 90% confidence, there’s often a rough equivalence between a media’s swag, and the quality of comedy found in it. But weakness and decay can yield fruit as well — Garrison Keillor on the radio, for example, or The Onion rising from the ashes of college humor. So you can get great stuff when a medium is frisky, or when it’s a backwater and no one is paying attention.

The reason there are so few funny books today is that we’re stuck in the middle: publishing’s still lucrative enough to be corporate, but weak enough to be afraid. They particularly fear comedy, and parody most of all. Corporate lawyers react to parody like Dracula does to garlic.

Why then, have I chosen to spend the cream of my years producing affectionate, unauthorized, book-length parodies like Barry Trotter and now Downturn Abbey? There are lots of reasons, and my therapist says I am making good progress. The only question now is, will I get well-adjusted enough to quit, or will corporate publishing go tits-up first? READ MORE

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