Satire Writers Forced To Scrap Article After Discovering The Thing Really Happened

WINOOSKI – Writers for the local Vermont satirical news site The Winooski are finding it harder and harder to do their jobs, they say, because they will often write an exaggerated article, only to later find out that the story contains too much truth to be considered satire. The writers say they have scrapped dozens of articles over the past few months after some last minute googling revealed actual real-life examples of the fake events they were trying to invent.

“Yeah, it’s tough,” said staff writer Zing Gacha. “Some days I write two or three headlines before I find one that isn’t true. I start every day by thinking, ‘what’s the stupidest thing that could never happen,’ and then I look online and it happened. I try now to google everything before I write the whole article, but even then sometimes the thing happens in between the writing and the publishing. One time we just went with it, but we do try not to do that. This is not an easy job, and the general decline of stable reality is making it even more difficult.”

The writer of yesterday’s article had to rewrite it twice, making it more absurd each time, when actual reality continually crept into her fiction. “Oh man, it sucked,” said satire writer Jess Kitten. “I wrote this great piece about people finding Valentine’s Day love at Ash Wednesday services, but then I was reading about how that was maybe sort of a thing, so I rewrote it to say that the churches were actually sponsoring romantic Ash Wednesday services, with cheesy 80’s love ballads as hymns and stuff, and then I get this note from the EIC saying that a bunch of churches were actually doing that! It wasn’t actually a joke. So I had to go even further and say that Tinder was sponsoring them, and it got a little raunchy, and now my grandmother isn’t speaking to me. So there is something of a personal cost as well.”

The staff of The Winooski asks that the general public be slightly more reasonable, so that they may exaggerate the facts and stretch the truth more easily in a way that seems both possible and absurd. The general public was not available for comment at press time, but judging from the past ten minutes or so, that request has been denied.