How The Daily Mash took the .uk sense of humour to the world
There’s something irrepressible about British satirical humour, and the world wide web has allowed a whole new raft of sites like the Daily Mash to be that cheeky kid wise-cracking from the back of the class.
“I just have to push a button, that’s it. I have no technical aptitude. We could complicate the system, but why bother?”
Editor Tim Telling is refreshingly honest when explaining the philosophy behind the Daily Mash, the British satire site started in 2007 by Neil Rafferty and Paul Stokes. Both left the world of newspapers — Rafferty was political correspondent for The Sunday Times, Stokes the business editor of The Scotsman — for the rough and tumble of making parodies on the web.
Telling relishes “the spontaneity and flexibility” that publishing on the web gives you over publishing in print.
You’ve got half a dozen people on a given day whom the muse may or may not be visiting. If it’s not, I’ve got some work to do. I’m the poor man’s muse.
“There’s always a couple of us who look at things before they go out, but we’re still spontaneous. The challenge is making sure that you feel before publication that you’re publishing something you believe in — you want to be original and bold and never generic.”
Because the site relies heavily on freelance writers, being editor can be an up-and-down experience: “Some days you have strong pitches and you don’t really have to do a lot, but sometimes the stories don’t quite live up to that — and sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised with everything. There’s no way of predicting it. You’ve got half a dozen people on a given day whom the muse may or may not be visiting. If it’s not, I’ve got some work to do. I’m the poor man’s muse.”
The team are completely distributed and all work remotely. As Tim says, “[We] could have an office and pot plants, but there’s no need for us to see each other on a daily basis.”
One of the nice things about the UK’s internet is that it has allowed British humour to flourish in a variety of styles.
As editor, he “marshals all the contributors from my home in Bristol. We’ve got eleven or twelve freelancers. Every day I step into the hamster wheel and pedal furiously until the content emerges. It’s usually in the region of half a dozen stories a day, 30 a week, so it goes at a fair old lick. I was a jobbing comedy writer and I just started writing a few bits for them when the site was in infancy.”
One of the nice things about the UK’s internet is that it has allowed British humour to flourish in a variety of styles. There’s something in British culture about being the smart-mouthed kid at the back of the class, disrupting everything with a devastatingly funny put-down for the teacher. That’s the kind of role that the Daily Mash fulfills.
And in contrast to sites like the Onion or Clickhole, it is noticeable that the Daily Mash, The Poke and Anorak have all opted to use .uk domain names rather than .com. It helps set them apart as having a British sensibility.
“Obviously we’re aware of the Onion,” Tim says. “I like all it tremendously, but they’re from an American cultural tradition, they have a different take on things. Maybe they’re more authentic to the news form itself, more authentically journalistic in their structure? The peril is — and a lot of comedy writers will say this — if you look at other people’s stuff you absorb it and can end up copying it unwittingly. I’m a comedy fan, but I don’t overindulge in it.”
And Tim reveals there is no “secret sauce” to making a Daily Mash story go virally popular on the web or social media.
“If I’ve ever got the feeling about something going viral, it’ll be thwarted! If I think something is a winner, the opposite will be true…in years to come, people will work out some chaos theory equivalent of the internet and then they’ll know. I haven’t figured it out. If there is a secret of going viral, cats are involved — but I can’t predict it. If I did I’d be a rich man.
“Some people do use us as a news service. I don’t say that proudly”
“Some things are popular purely just because they’re funny; they have no bearing on anything but they’re funny. You can sweat blood trying to come up with coruscating intelligent satire, and then write something about a block of cheese, and it’ll work. But that’s fine — we exist to be funny, we’re not really here to educate. If we do, it’s a surprising side effect. Some people do use us as a news service, though. I don’t say that proudly.”
It’s difficult to imagine quite how weird the worldview would be of someone who used the Daily Mash as a news source — recent articles have included “Plasterers distraught about 1D’s Louis having a baby”, “Nobody sure why wedding guest is wearing a kilt” and “Susanna Reid has large doner for breakfast,”, but equally, who would want to imagine an internet without those kinds of articles?
“It’ll roll on at least for the remainder of human civilisation”
Asked about the future for the Daily Mash, Telling was in a bullish mood: “It’ll roll on at least for the remainder of human civilisation. Until the charred husk of anthropomorphic cockroaches take over, there will always be online satire at the Daily Mash.”
This story is one of 30 celebrating the launch of .uk domain names in 1985. To read the others visit our 30 Years of .uk hub. To start your own .uk story check out www.agreatplacetobe.uk.
