The Tall Tale
Stories stretched just past believable ~ exactly how we like them.
The Daily Fib
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The Slogan Is The Shortest Form Of Political Comedy
Political comedy comes in many lengths. An hour of stand-up. A newspaper column. A single panel cartoon. -
What Satire Cannot Do, And Why It Matters
A defence of political comedy has to be honest about its limits, or it is just advertising. -
The Comic Value Of A Very Serious Man
Comedy has understood something for a very long time that keeps being rediscovered. The funniest possible character is not the clown. -
Every Political Scandal Follows The Same Five Steps
Watch enough public controversies and you stop being surprised by any of them, because they run on rails. -
The Complete Guide To The Non Apology
The genuine apology is a simple thing. Somebody says what they did, says it was wrong, and says what happens now. Three parts, under twenty words, extremely rare in public life. -
Trust Nothing Orange And Other Useful Rules
Everybody needs a small set of rules for deciding what to believe, because checking everything properly is not available to anybody with a job. -
The Political Speech Contains No Sentences
Try an experiment during the next political speech you happen across. Listen for a sentence that makes a specific, checkable claim about something that will happen. -
Satire Has Always Been The Oldest Job In Politics
For as long as anybody has held power, somebody standing nearby has been making fun of them. This is not a modern decline in standards. It is possibly the most consistent tradition in public life.
Latest Articles
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35% Off, Full Strength: A Tour of the Collection
Somewhere out there, a man once looked at a camera and explained that the crowd was the biggest in history while the photo behind him showed a gentle scattering of folding chairs. I think about that a lot. Not because it was shocking (nothing is anymore) but because it was theater... and theater deserves a review. That is more or less why the 35% Off collection exists. -
Soft Shirts, Hard Truths
I sat through another week of podium theatrics so you didn't have to, and I can report that the truth is still out there... it has simply been asked to wait in the lobby. We can't fix the podium. We can dress for it. A fresh round of Everyday Supersoft T-Shirts just went live on the shop, and every design says the quiet part out loud (in something softer than the quiet part deserves). -
Inside The Spin Room, Where the Twirling Finally Stops
I have sat through enough press briefings to know the choreography by heart. A question goes in, a pirouette comes out, and everybody applauds the footwork so loudly that nobody notices the question is still standing there, unanswered, holding its coat. At some point you stop being annoyed and start taking notes. That is how The Spin Room was born.
