The Daily Squib

Book excerpt: As the follies and absurdities of the powerful are destroying the world through war, pandemic, and climate change, what better time to release The Daily Squib: Anthology from 2007 to 2022? Over the last 15 years, the Squib has held a crazy distorted fairground mirror to global events. Sometimes its spoofs have even been mistaken for real news―what higher accolade is there for a satirist? Its mock report on the Ku Klux Klan declaring its support for Barack Obama in the 2008 US elections and its fake interview with Henry Kissinger (2011) fooled serious outlets across the world. More than that, the Squib has somehow become an unholy satirical oracle by predicting an EU army 5 years before anyone else was talking about it and, in 2018, the COVID-19 pandemic, even pinpointing somewhere in Asia as the source. Though like lots of other good things this has been overlooked by the mainstream media, the Squib has played an innovative role in shaping internet-based comedy since 2007 and has fought hard for free speech in a climate of increasing puritanism on both the political left and right. Read these articles with the same gusto and passion with which they were created, as they form an alternative historical record of a turbulent time of conflict, disease, terrorism, official stupidity, and mass-delusion. Alternatively, the less pretentious reader can flick through it while taking a dump and either chuckle to themselves as they plop away ... or if they don't find it funny can use its luxuriously produced pages as bog paper.