Stephen Johnson at Big Think:
When amateur writers pitch headlines to The Onion, their jokes often flop. One reason may surprise you: They use too many funny words that wink at the reader, “wacky” elements that sabotage any chance at good parody, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo told our sister site Big Think in 2012.
“It’s counterintuitive, but it’s that dry tone and that straight tone of the newspaper article — of the kind of AP style of writing, or New York Times style of writing — is what we strive to achieve,” Randazzo said. “Sometimes just deleting an extra little funny word makes the joke that much better because it’s really emulating that style.”
Parody requires verisimilitude: the act of mirroring the style, tone, and conventions of your target as closely as possible — “down to every syllable and punctuation mark,” Scott Dikkers, a cofounding editor of The Onion, explains in his book How To Write Funny.
More here.
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