A plea for satire from Monday Monday

Full disclosure: this is really more of a rallying cry than a satire so don’t come in here expecting jokes. Any humor you find in this note has arisen entirely from coincidence and should not be laughed at. Thank you.

The office of Monday Monday is in a dire state. For those of you unaware, Monday Monday is the name of The Chronicle’s weekly satire column, written anonymously each semester by a different student or team of them. Typically each Monday Monday will craft a specific character (for example “Mean Boy” or “Dear Dookie”) and use this persona to whimsically comment on the week’s news, doing so for a full semester until he has to unmask himself in his final column.

Monday Monday has dwindled in popularity the last few years. The problem has gotten so bad that there were actually no applications to write Monday Monday for this semester—I’m only doing it now because I was asked. But the contradiction here is that there is an appetite for satire on campus and, equally important, there’s the talent.

Duke people are funny people. It’s no secret that we compete with one another socially, and a huge part of that competition is showing how funny you are. Combine that with our proclivity for complaining about everything and you have the basic ingredients necessary for good satire. And we need good satire. We need it because the university administration is so gaffe-prone it’s like an episode of Veep; we need it because our student body overachieves to the point of self-punishment; and we need it because bad people keep doing bad things here, and those people need to be mocked.

So here is my plea: please, if you have the slightest interest, apply to be Monday Monday. Applications just opened and are due Monday the 14^th of December. Do you think the various goings-on on campus are ludicrous? Perhaps you feel your voice has been marginalized and that the mask of anonymity may make people take your words more seriously? Maybe you want the power to decide whether the name “Monday, Monday” should be rendered with a comma or not? If any of these apply to you, you could be Duke’s next great satirist.

The fewer applications we get the smaller the talent pool and the worse the satire. That’s exactly the reason Monday Monday’s been lacklustre for years. But there are satirists out there on campus far greater than me or my predecessors; and for Duke’s sake, I hope they step up soon.

Monday Monday is now seriously considering writing a Veep parody with the Duke administration for its subject.