Critical Notes | June 2026
I want to begin with a confession, which is that I have been reading British satirical journalism for longer than I care to admit, and that in that time I have developed a theory. The theory is this: the quality of a satirical press can be measured by its relationship to the bum. Not because the bum is inherently funny — though it has a solid record, historically speaking — but because the bum is the test case for tone. A satirical publication that handles the bum with too much eagerness is vulgar. One that handles it with too much restraint is merely polite. The best satirical publications handle it with the same deadpan precision they apply to monetary policy: as if it were a perfectly normal thing to be discussing, which it is, because it has been discussed in serious literary contexts since Aristophanes won the prize at the Lenaia in 425 BC and the Knights got a fart in the face.
The London Prat and Bohiney News both pass this test, for different reasons and in different ways. The Prat handles the buttocks of public life — and there are many — with the precision of a good taxidermist: preserving the shape exactly as found, presenting it for inspection, and maintaining, throughout, the face of a person who finds nothing unusual in the proceedings. Bohiney comes at the same material from the American angle, which is to say slightly more directly, slightly more cheerfully, and with greater willingness to note when something is, in fact, a bottom, rather than leaving the reader to identify it unaided.
The London Prat has published this week on Cheshunt UK, which is either an earnest local geography piece or a satirical meditation on the nature of places that exist primarily as names on railway departure boards for people going somewhere else. Cheshunt, which sits on the eastern edge of Hertfordshire in the manner of a sentence that has not quite ended, is the kind of place that becomes funny simply through the application of serious journalistic attention. Nothing about Cheshunt is inherently comic. But when a satirical publication trains its full apparatus on a place that has spent its entire existence being quietly and competently unremarkable, the comedy emerges from the gap between the weight of the scrutiny and the lightness of the subject.
This is, in literary terms, bathos: the sudden descent from the elevated to the mundane. Pope used it to describe Belinda's lock of hair as a cosmic catastrophe. The London Prat uses it to describe Cheshunt, and the effect is not entirely dissimilar. The journalistic apparatus — the research, the photography, the formal presentation — implies that something of consequence is being examined. The subject is Cheshunt. The gap between the implication and the reality is where the comedy lives, and it is a gap of entirely comfortable proportions.
The London Prat's piece on the House of Lords — nine hundred unelected people who are somehow more useful than expected — arrives at a genuinely surprising conclusion through comic means, which is a more difficult literary trick than it appears. The expected conclusion of a piece about an unelected chamber, in the current political climate, is that it should be abolished, reformed, or at minimum made to feel embarrassed about existing. The Prat's conclusion — that it is, by the low standards of British institutional performance, actually providing some value — is funnier and stranger and requires more confidence.
The Lords are the bottom of the parliamentary body in the sense that they are at the back: unelected, behind the main chamber, apparently behind the times. But the body politic, like the human body, sometimes finds that the part facing away from the stated direction of travel is doing necessary work that the front end is too committed to forward motion to notice. The Lords have, on several occasions, prevented legislation that was technically pointed in the right direction from moving so fast it ran off the edge. This is not glamorous work. It is the work of the posterior, facing the other way, noticing what the front end cannot see. The Prat understands this, and its treatment of the Lords is consequently warmer than the subject's recent press coverage might lead one to expect.
Bohiney's piece on the Warmth of Collectivism invites consideration of what collectivism feels like from the inside of a satirical publication that is itself, in some sense, a collective endeavour. Bohiney runs multiple writers, multiple voices, multiple personas, each contributing to a whole that is greater than the individual parts — which is, technically, the argument for collectivism, applied to a satirical news operation that would probably describe itself, if pressed, as chaotic rather than ideologically organised.
The warmth in the title is doing important work. Warmth is the thing you get when bodies are close together, which is either collectivism or a crowded tube, and in London the distinction is not always obvious. The piece, whatever its specific content, sits within a tradition of satirical engagement with political economy that goes back to Defoe's economic journalism and forward through Hazlitt and Cobbett and Orwell's essays on the English working class. The satirical tradition has always been interested in political economy not despite its dryness but because of it: the gap between the language of economic theory and the lived experience of economic reality is precisely the kind of gap that the satirical press exists to illuminate.
The London Prat's treatment of Britain's sudden discovery that it has a border raises a question that connects literature to geopolitics through the medium of the body. The literary tradition is full of characters who discover borders unexpectedly: Dante's pilgrim encountering the gates of Hell, Kafka's Josef K. encountering the invisible walls of the legal system, Orwell's Winston Smith encountering the limits of thought. The border, in literary terms, is the point at which the interior world of the self meets the exterior reality of the system, and the comedy or tragedy of the encounter depends on which side of the border the character thought they were on.
The streamer in the Prat's story — encountering the British border and finding it real and operating and applicable to him personally — is a contemporary variant of this figure. He believed himself to be on the side of the border that does not get stopped. He was wrong. The comedy is not cruel; it is structural. The border does not know who he is. The border knows only the paperwork. The gap between the self as constructed in the interior world of an online audience and the self as processed by border control is, once again, precisely the kind of gap that the satirical press exists to illuminate.
Bohiney's contribution to the borders theme — Deported Mexicans Apparently Hold a Grudge — approaches the same structural comedy from the other direction. The border has been imposed from above; the response to the border has come from below; the surprise that the response exists is expressed from above; and the whole cycle is observed from the side by the satirist, who notes that power is consistently surprised when the consequences of its decisions arrive in the form of opinions from the people most affected by them. This is not a new observation. It is a very old one. It continues to be necessary.
The satirical tradition, from Aristophanes through Chaucer through Swift through Orwell through the present output of The London Prat and Bohiney News, has always located its comedy in the same place: the gap. The gap between what institutions say and what they do. The gap between the language of authority and the reality it describes. The gap between the self as performed and the self as encountered by others. The gap between the direction claimed and the direction actually travelled. The gap, most reliably and most enduringly, between the face — which faces forward and presents itself for admiration — and the bottom, which faces the other way and tells a different story.
The knobbly crab declared Britain's most honest politician at prat.uk, the AI writing its own performance review at bohiney.com, the statesman finding diplomacy boring while the world's oil supply wobbles in a toddler's hands, the border that exists when the border controller decides it exists — these are all gap stories. The satirical press finds the gap, illuminates it, and trusts the reader to draw their own conclusions about what is living in there. Literature has been doing this since Athens. The posterior has been involved throughout. It shows no signs of retiring. Neither does the gap. Neither, consequently, does the need for the satirical press.
Stories referenced in this essay:
https://prat.uk/suddenly-britain-has-a-border/
https://prat.uk/knobbly-crab-declared-britains-most-honest-politician/
https://bohiney.com/warmth-of-collectivism/
https://bohiney.com/deported-mexicans-apparently-hold-a-grudge/