“Reality has become too absurd to be satirized”

Ironically, tracking down the attribution for this classic aphorism is, itself, an exercise in absurdity.   Depending on what corner of the internet you ask, it might be GK Chesterton, Tom Lehrer, Fran Leibovitz, Christopher Buckley or Evelyn Waugh.   

Kyle Mann notes that the aphorism has been floating around the English Language in one form or another for about a century, maybe more.  

Mann is, as this is written, the editor in chief at The Babylon Bee, an online satire site disguised as a news outlet that on the one hand is all satire, and on the other not-at-all disconnected hand may be one of modern America’s best news sources, not despite being a satire publication but because of it.  The Bee’s satirical “news” coverage has not only been covered as hard news by several mainstream media outlets – the hapless Snopes has “fact-checked” the Bee’s satire several times, and the Bee took the New York Times to the brink of litigation over the Times classifying the Bee as a “Hard Right” news source –  but has anticipated actual hard news on more than a few occasions. 

So – maybe the aphorism is wrong?

Maybe reality, especially the reality of politics in modern America, has become so absurd that satire is truly the most accurate way to analyze it?

In the summer of 2004 that was the last thing that was on my mind. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, June 24th, 2026 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Berg's Law - The Book. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.