Ah, the final Monday Monday of the semester: much like an acceptance speech, except that at the end of it, instead of an award, you get a dubious reputation as a writer.
Monday Monday turned 37 years old this October. Originally founded to be a kind of light take on the week’s news, it eventually morphed into a character-based satire in which the authors used their alter-egos to skewer various aspects of life at Duke. Of course, as is wont to be true of an anonymous collegiate humour column, Monday Monday often got itself into trouble for offensive content. Usually this meant insulting some campus group or another—Asian students, Jewish students, Common Ground—although, in one impressive feat of unanimous campus backlash in 2005, four students managed to go further and get themselves fired as Monday Monday for targeting Coach K in an article.
When I took over in May, I felt that model had been done to death. It had served its purpose and produced some great satire, but dwindling readership and lack of visibility showed that something wasn’t working anymore. So instead of crafting a character like “Grumpy Trustee” or “MONEY SHOT” for myself, I tried to strip it back to the basics. I would write only under the name “Monday Monday”. I would vary up the format of each column depending on the joke that week. Last, I would slap “Monday Monday” on every column title to make sure my writing stuck out among all the other columns.
And the result of all this? Well, just take a look at some of the overwhelming plaudits my columns have received this semester.
- “It was eh.” – a member of my comedy group
- “Monday Monday gives me like, 70 percent of what I want it to.” – someone in my selective living group
- “I didn’t think it was funny or constructive.” – a message on a GroupMe that got six likes
Truly, my time as Monday Monday can be incontrovertibly and proudly described as something that happened.
Nah but really, it’s been fun. I picked up the job in May and managed to immediately accidentally convince a bunch of people that I was Paul Farmer (spoiler: I’m not). In short order, I had annoyed The Chronicle’s apparently abundant right-wing non-student readership, attacked (read: possibly libelled) a Fortune 500 company and unsubtly jeered opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement. This latter one picked up some—very understandable—flak, being called unproductive and unhelpful for campus dialogue. It’s a fair point: I was essentially trying to make the opposing arguments look dumb. But there was reason behind this.
Academia around satire often distinguishes between two types: Horatian and Juvenalian satire. Horatian satire pokes fun at our foibles, aiming to unite us through humour—think “The Simpsons” or “Dr Strangelove”. Juvenalian satire by contrast is angry, using ridicule to condemn what it sees as moral wrongs (examples include Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or “American Psycho”). Now to clarify, our generation’s Jonathan Swift I am not, but I used both of these types of satire where I felt them appropriate. I do not believe the job of Monday Monday is to make you feel comfortable. I believe the job of Monday Monday is to satirise—if that means prodding light fun at how awkward Duke students are, then do that. But if that means standing up and making fun of racists, it’s important Monday Monday do that too. Humour is a powerful social normaliser, and its ire should be pointed always and clearly in the direction of oppression.
As you can no doubt tell, I have a deep love for satire. Accordingly I tried to channel my favourite influences into my own work as Monday Monday. “The oral history of renovation” for example was my shot at a ClickHole-style long form piece. “Duke 2020” was an attempt to apply Charlie Brooker’s brilliant “Black Mirror” speculative satire to Duke. And of course, in columns like “God declares U.S. ‘greatest nation on Earth!’” I was paying obligatory homage to that fountainhead of modern satire, The Onion. For the most part, I tried to avoid the whole fake news thing though as Scott Dikkers himself pointed out when he visited campus this semester, there are a lot of Onion copycats these days, and I didn’t want to seem to be rehashing someone else’s format.
Of course, there were some pieces I never got to write. Here are some of my favourites:
- “Monday Monday’s Inferno”: An investigative piece in which Monday Monday tries to find out why there’s always smoke coming out of the ground outside Kilgo and Social Sciences. Turns out it’s because Duke is actually Hell and we're all locked in limbo here forever.
- “Students disappearing upon saying ‘I just can’t’”: a fake news piece describing students saying “I just can’t” and literally immediately ceasing to exist. Relatedly, students who say “turn up” begin revolving upwards and gradually spin away into the sky. The literal interpretation for “it’s lit” was too violent to include here.
- And finally, “Wanking in the Panopticon”: a riff on the fact Duke always knows when you’re watching pornography.
It’s been a good semester to write satire at Duke. Of course, the flipside of that is that it’s been a pretty unfortunate semester for Duke itself. Sorry ‘bout that. But I hope, at the very least, that my columns have provided some relief. I hope that if you were angry at something on campus my ridicule made you laugh; I hope that if you were tired or depressed in the morning my jokes perked you up a little. I hope, ultimately, that I helped show you how silly this place is. Because let’s be clear, people: Duke is ridiculous. And if I’m totally honest? That’s not something it needs my help proving.
My name is Bron Maher, and I’ve been Monday Monday.
Bron Maher is a Trinity senior and a writer/performer with Duke Inside Joke. Those who correctly guessed his identity in advance should go to the Duke Store and ask to receive their limited edition Bron Maher/Monday Monday bobblehead prize.
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