by A nineteen-year-old starts at a London comic paper and learns that eleven words is ten too many
My First Week Writing Headlines and I Have Been Told I Am Not Funny Yet
It is Friday night, I am on the 149 bus with my forehead against the window, and I have survived my first week of proper employment. I would like it recorded that I cried only once, in the toilets, on Wednesday, for under four minutes, and that I fixed my mascara and nobody knew. Or everybody knew and they were kind. Either way.
For anyone who has just started reading: I am nineteen, I did not go to university because I looked at the fees and had a lie down, and by a chain of events involving a competition, a cheeky email and what I think was a clerical error, I have a job as the most junior writer at The London Prat. It is a comic newspaper. It has been going since 1961, which is older than my mum. My job is to write jokes that look like news. I thought this would be easy.
Monday
I arrived at twenty to nine in a blazer I bought specially. Nobody else arrived until ten, and when they did, not one of them was in a blazer. One man was in what I am fairly sure were pyjama bottoms. I have not worn the blazer since. It is on the back of my chair like a small monument to who I thought I was going to be.
The editor gave me a desk by the radiator, a login and one instruction. She said: write me fifty headlines by four o’clock. Just headlines. No articles. I said, fifty? She said the first forty would be rubbish and she needed me to get them out of my system.
I wrote fifty. I was quite pleased with about twelve. At four she read them in silence, standing up, with a red pen. She put a tick by one. One. Out of fifty. Then she said, good, that is a normal first day, and went to make tea.
What Was Wrong With the Other Forty-Nine
I asked. I thought I had better. She pulled up a chair and went through them, and it was the most useful half hour of education I have had since somebody taught me to read.
Too long, mostly. My best one, I thought, was twenty-three words. She crossed out fourteen of them and it was suddenly twice as funny. She said a headline is not a joke with a set-up and a punchline. It is only the punchline, and the reader’s own head supplies the set-up. If you explain it, you have killed it.
Too silly, some of them. I had a dinosaur in one. She said the trick is not to say something mad. It is to say something nearly true in the flattest voice possible. The reader should be two words in before they realise. If it could not possibly be a real headline, it is a cartoon, not a news story.
And too mean, three of them. I had gone for a couple of people who had not really done anything except be famous and a bit annoying. She said we aim up, at people with power, and at ideas, and at ourselves. Not at somebody for the way they look. She was not cross. She just drew a line through them and said, you will not want your name on those in a year.
Homework
She sent me home with reading. The paper has a piece on its own site called how to run a satirical website, which is sort of the staff handbook nobody admits is a handbook, and I read it on the bus with a highlighter like I was revising. Then the page on the British Onion tradition, which is about where all this comes from. I had honestly thought people just started doing it on the internet about ten years ago. It turns out there are about three hundred years of it. I felt quite small, and then quite excited.
Wednesday, Briefly
Wednesday was the crying. I had done another fifty, and another, and I had four ticks in total out of a hundred and fifty, and the man in the pyjama bottoms, who has been there eleven years, wrote six headlines in the time it took me to open a packet of crisps and every one of them went straight up on the site. I went and had my four minutes.
When I came back there was a biscuit on my keyboard. Nobody said anything. I do not know who left it. I have decided it was all of them.
Thursday
On Thursday I got one published. One headline, eleven words, with a short piece underneath that the pyjama man helped me with. It was about the buses. I know about the buses. I spend two hours a day on them. The editor said that was the point: write what annoys you personally and it will annoy forty thousand other people in exactly the same way.
It went up at half past two on the London satirical news page. I refreshed it about ninety times. Somebody I have never met shared it and wrote, this is literally my morning. I am not ashamed to say I took a photo of my screen and sent it to my mum, who replied with a thumbs up and then, a minute later: is it true? So I sent her the paper’s guide on how to tell satire from real news. She has not replied. I think she is going through the checklist.
Things I Have Learned About Offices
You are allowed to just get up and make tea. Nobody rings a bell. If you make one you have to offer, and remembering who has what is a skill in itself; I have a list on a sticky note. The pyjama man has his in a mug that says World’s Okayest Dad.
Lunch in the City costs about nine pounds if you are not careful. I am now very careful. I bring pasta in a tub.
Everybody reads the competition, all day, openly. The Daily Mash and NewsThump are up on half the screens. I thought that would be a secret. It is more like footballers watching other matches. When one of the others does a really good one, someone reads it out and the room goes quiet and a bit sick with envy, and then they all type faster.
Tonight
So that is week one. Two hundred and fifty headlines written. Six ticks. One published. One biscuit. One blazer, retired.
The bus has just gone past the big bingo hall, which means I am twenty minutes from home. Dad will have saved me a plate. He still does not completely understand what the job is. He tells people I work in newspapers, which is true, and that I write the news, which is the exact opposite of true.
The editor said one more thing as I was leaving. She said, you are not funny yet. Then she said, yet is the important word, and I would not have bothered telling you otherwise. I have been turning that over since Liverpool Street. I think it might be the nicest thing a boss has ever said to me. I have only had one boss. But still.
I am keeping this diary on Londonish, and the single published headline, plus whatever comes after it, will be on my page here. Monday: fifty more.
