Mallow News, the parody Twitter account, goes mainstream with a new book
mallow news
If there’s one thing that comedy should always aspire to be, it’s a great leveller, a backdoor to accountability and deeper discussion in public and private life alike.
But in a year where the news itself has put the social and artistic relevance of satire in particular into question, it’s reassuring to know that a razor wit and a keen eye are still enough to break up the discourse, providing conversations and newsfeeds alike with levity, perspective, and ultimately humanity.
Taking a well-worn ‘spoof news and opinions’ template and making something fresh of it in the age of social media must be especially challenging, but this has been the small but significant triumph of the ‘modestly-successful’ Mallow News Twitter account: taking on national issues and figures and dissecting them with the weary, withering eye of a man who was born and reared in North County Cork, and lives to tell the tale.
“Like most things, I came to Twitter late. When I was in secondary school at the Academy in Mallow, I had a bunch of friends that would do prank phone calls, back when you could do prank phone calls, before Caller ID.
“Unfortunately, none of them had any interest in doing something similar with Twitter, because they’d all gotten on with their lives, so I set up a page, initially with the intention of doing very locally focussed stuff, but that went down like a lead balloon, nobody was interested in the content.”
Speaking over the phone from an undisclosed location in North County Cork, the man behind the account, here going by ‘Stephen Black’ to preserve his valuable anonymity, is matter-of-fact in his account of the sometimes mind-altering monotony that goes into becoming a minor figure of notoriety in the panopticon of human attention that is Irish Twitter.
“It’s something I’ve been working away on in my spare time, local and national news. There’s no use in trying to talk the same sh*te as everyone else about what’s been going on in the US and the UK.
“To put it into perspective, only about 10-12% of the country has Twitter and there are novelty accounts that spring up overnight that can get two, three times the following I’ve built. So while I’m not a failure, I wouldn’t say I’m a roaring success either.
“But it’s been five years of drudgery, of live-tweeting The Late Late Show, Room to Improve, the Rose of Tralee, all of this - at this stage, I’ve rewired my brain to a critical dependency on the little dopamine hits I get when someone retweets me. I’m more of a slave to it now than at any stage.”
Sending up aspects of Irish life that are in dire need of it is one thing. It’s quite another entirely, however, to do so in the year 2020: the foundations of world politics have been shaken by tectonic shifts, while domestic affairs have been blighted by consecutive scandals while the Covid-19 crisis has by necessity rearranged the way we live and socialise, with its full extent or endpoint still not entirely evident.
It must be no mean feat, then, to negotiate the ever-shifting contours of absurdity and humour, when the circumstances themselves are unlike anything in our collective frame of reference. The conversation on what constitutes satire in 2020 drifts to the recent reboot on BBC television as a sterling example of these creative and cognitive difficulties.
“ was never funny. I’m old enough to remember finding it funny as a kid, because of the puppets, but it was lazy, lazy writing where the puppets did the heavy lifting, ‘here, look at the funny puppets’.
“Satire is supposed to be comedy that went to college: it’s just basic absurdist humour, that exaggerates peoples’ flaws and laughs at them. You’re supposed to be punching up.
“But when the real people are so grotesque, it becomes a situation. The real people are so grotesque, and so ridiculous, that it’s impossible to do just that, unless the writing is top-notch, which it isn’t.”
Black’s first book, the grandiosely-titled , sees the commentator become a Real Writer, taking the familiarity and tropes of regional print news as muse for a selection of increasingly-acerbic tales of life in modern Ireland.
The mundanity of everyday existence is filtered through the experiences of those least aware of themselves, from comfortably retired politicians and overly-chummy media personalities, to young fellas with acoustic guitars and sports stars plugging tell-all autobiographies.
Meanwhile, excerpts from exciting, upcoming books like ‘Jesus Christ, What A Complete Gobnait’ sit alongside the body count from this week’s road bowling, and news of country star Nathan Carter’s recent incident with an interdimensional portal.
“The genesis of it was that the editors at Hachette got in touch asking had I ever done a book, or would I consider it. The answer was no, because what I do isn’t writing, it’s 280 characters, nothing like longform writing, but I thought about it and decided to give it a go.
“I gave myself anxiety going through the years of god-awful sh*te I was tweeting about. There was very little there, an awful lot of the book was from scratch.”
The newly-minted author discusses the process of adapting ideas, characters, and the account’s humour, cleaving them to the local-news format to develop them into a succession of tawdry tales.
“Irish politics provides an awful lot of inspiration. I started with a look at the General Election this year, and expounded on that, to get a few funny lines every paragraph, and tried to tie it up neatly at the end. I was given a word count of 250-300 for each of the standard ‘articles’, so it was just doing research, looking at how news is written, the format of it, and trying to adhere to that. Just a process of failure, to get to the good stuff.
“I just got the head down and got on with it. It was right in lockdown, so I was trying to cope with that, cope with work, cope with family, so it was a good distraction.
"I’d write something, send it in, they’d give feedback, mostly to keep the stories short. It’s a muscle I haven’t used before, and to be fair to actual writers, it takes skill and practice that I didn’t have the scope for this time around.”
Between the process of fleshing ideas out into full short stories with the help of an editorial team, and seeing them brought to life with a series of illustrations from fellow Mallow man Cathal O’Gara that tread the line between impressionism and fever nightmares, one wonders how Black feels about the end result hitting shelves this week, and the idea of seeing a longform adaptation of his creation in homes across the country.
“I read it and I see some of the flaws - I could have written this better, that reads a bit clunky, but is it funny? I think it’s funny.
“Ultimately, what it is, in the best way possible, it is a high-quality toilet book. If you need to escape from the walls closing in downstairs, with family or friends, or whatever, if you need to withdraw to the only room in the house that is left to you, this is an opportunity for you to decompress, pick an article and read until you have to get up, and get the circulation back in your legs.
“It’s a great Christmas gift idea, in that respect.”
For many reading the book out of a local interest (your writer included), what will hit the hardest about the whole affair is how deeply it revels in a hyper-real version of the North Cork experience, using the pace and familiarity of small-town life, and all that attends, as fertile ground for social and cultural commentary.
Black discusses the particulars of digging into his own ties to the area, and pulling stories like these from his discoveries.
“The town you grow up in will always leave an indelible mark: it’s the black hole that you never escape. You can move away, go to college, work abroad, but it’ll always be part of you. You’ll never forget it, regardless of your upbringing, it’s always there for you.
“The paradox of growing up in a small town in Ireland is that everyone that grew up there invariably hates it, but if you say one bad word about the town and you’re not from there, ‘f**k you’.”
Does Black fear reprisals from the people of Buttevant, a longstanding target of his ridicule, who he has long antagonised on Twitter, and takes aim at again in the book?
“Not unless they get someone to read the book to them, no.”
Having not only Written a Book, but also Having Had It Published, all while balancing his personal life with maintaining an effective monopoly over live-tweeting weekend talk shows, one can only marvel at what ambitions Black harbours next for what’s arguably been the breakout new-media project of the 2020s so far.
“Having been buoyed on by my success, I am now looking to option the rights to a serialisation of the book, and have entered talks with Amy Huberman to star.
“Otherwise, just more of the same, really. The book will either do well or it won’t do well. Will I still be tweeting about the same sh*te in the new year? Probably.”
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