What’s so funny?

This is from the fifth edition of the Near-Earth Object newsletter, to which you can and should subscribe, right here.

How do you make political satire when the real political universe is already a parody of itself? I’m hardly the first to ask a question like this, but some recent events have made this question more salient than it has been for a while.

To be effective, political satire begins with what we know to be true (or at least plausible) about a given individual, group, or issue position, and stretches it — in a logical direction — toward an absurdity, thereby highlighting the flaws or harmful implications of whatever is being parodied.

But in the real world, right now, one side of the political debate is living out the parody. “Not The Onion,” the once-ubiquitous refrain on Twitter in response to news about the president, is now nowhere to be seen, because, well, why bother? The president himself just the other day retweeted a satire piece from the definitely not-funny Babylon Bee, thinking it was real. The very fact that most Americans even know what QAnon is tells you all you need to know about how the absurd has become all too real.

My friend Brian Hogg wrote a parody autobiography of Trump in 2016, , which is absolutely hilarious. After Trump actually won the election, which neither he nor I expected, and the damage he would…