Interviewing the Mash...

Spiked Online has an interview with Neil Rafferty of the excellent Daily Mash.

The Mash is the brainchild of Scottish journalists, Neil Rafferty and Paul Stokes. After meeting on a failed Scottish business paper, Rafferty and Stokes searched for a project that allowed them to indulge their shared sense of humour. ‘We saw a gap in the market, that the UK didn’t have an equivalent to [the US satirical news site] The Onion’, says Rafferty. ‘It had satire—Private Eye is a satirical institution, but the Eye didn’t have a very strong online presence at all. And secondly, while the Eye still hits the mark, I guess it’s that upper-sixth common room sense of humour, which you either like or don’t like. There was the opportunity to do something very topical with a more modern sense of humour.’

The Mash mixes the topical edge of the Eye with the lewdly adult humour of student favourite Viz and a healthy dose of the absurd. But it also has an edge in being written by people who absolutely cannot stand the current government one little bit. As Rafferty puts it, the Mash is ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes, with swearing.’

The Mash is funny whereas I don't think that the Eye is, in general. Admittedly, their satire of Gordon Brown and the Age of Change has been spot on but, in general, the Daily Mash definitely has the edge.

The interview is worth reading also for the kickings doled out to Rory Bremner ("a talented mimic, but his take on the world is tediously predictable") and irritating Marcus Brigstocke ("the worst example of the lazy art of ‘topical’ comedy"). Apparently, the latter was recently described—by Antonia Quirke in the New Statesman—as...

... truly the unfunniest arse in the universe… [whose delivery] just assumes the audience will be complicit in the utterly bog-standard, unsurprising bit of wafty liberal observation that is coming out of his mouth. Funny people don’t do this.

One cannot really disagree with that assessment...