NewsBiscuit

First of all many thanks for such an overwhelming response to the submissions board; the pages are teeming with ideas, and a high number of the stories on the front page are originating from this part of the site.

A few writers have asked for some tips, so here are a few basic guidelines, and our apologies if some of them sound a bit bleeding obvious.

NewsBiscuit is a parody of a news website so clearly what we are looking for first and foremost is spoof news stories. They don’t have to be topical, indeed many of the articles we publish could have been written anytime during the last few years. If a news story is huge and on-going then we’d welcome a new angle on it. But we are not interested in jokes that require the reader to have already read the item on page 17 of the Daily Telegraph. (Neither does it help to link to the original story, the piece needs to stand in its own right.) Over a quarter of our readers are from the United States, so it’s a bonus if the story would be understood all around the world, but we don’t want to limit ourselves, (hence ‘Midsomer Murders’ and ‘squeezy Marmite jars’). The main criterion is whether it makes us laugh or not – which is more important than that elusive holy grail of comedy that is ‘satirically hard-hitting’.

The headline should be funny – so ‘Interesting development at Stock Exchange’ is not going to make it. Try and get the essence of the comedy idea in one line.

Silly names are not particularly to our taste – a quote from ‘Professor Strangle-Badger’ will probably detract from the purity of the comedy idea. Internal logic is the key here – everything in the article should relate to and develop from the original idea, including of course the brilliant punchline(!) For example, there was a good gag recently about the Iraqi courtroom being redecorated and Saddam Hussein saying he didn’t recognise the court. We would have loved to crowbar that gag into the story about Saddam being condemned to rule Iraq, but that would have been an illogical diversion. That’s not to say that a story cannot have more than one comic idea in it – the headline ‘Undaunted old person does something normally done by young people’ starts out as a parody of cliched local news reporting but then develops as it turns out that the granny is going out binge-drinking.

The length of the material that is already up there should give you an approximate idea of what we are looking for; unless the story develops as with the example above, there is no point in coming at the same basic joke from various different angles. Longer non-news ideas are welcome; spoof reviews, columnists, letters, horoscopes etc. all could make a welcome addition to the embryonic features section. Like the news stories, this is still quite likely to get rewritten, but as we say elsewhere on the site, if you object to your material being savagely redrafted, then this is probably not the site for you.

A few writers stick their first draft up on the submissions board, instead of spending time rewriting it, printing it out in hard copy, reading and re-working and editing it. Spending longer on each submission is thoroughly recommended because you can then be far more indignant when we just take your headline and virtually start again from scratch. Many professional comedy writers started out in partnerships, we would love it if teamwork could evolve on this site, with ‘wiki-gag writing’ developing in which punchlines were suggested for each others pieces etc. It should not be beyond the etiquette of the site that another writer takes someone else’s story and redrafts it, edits it or whatever. We will look at all the various drafts if we are to put a story on the front page, and make a judgement as to giving credit where it is deserved!

A few other style things; we don’t tend to refer to ourselves, so ‘Newsbiscuit can reveal’ or ‘an informer told NewsBiscuit’ is something you should probably avoid. It hopefully goes without saying that racist, sexist and homophobic material is not welcome. However this is not the 1980s and material about race, sex, religion etc is fine if it is coming from the right direction. We don’t mind stuff that may seem in questionable taste, as long as the sickness of a joke is not just shocking for its own sake. (e.g. the submission about hospital patients being treated after a TV phone vote upset one or two people, but had something to say as well as being funny).

Obviously we are looking for original material, so don’t forward us a funny viral email you received, or a photo your mate sent you. If you see something on the submissions board or indeed on the main site that you think has been nicked from The Onion or a 1949 Arthur Askey sketch please point it out and we will make a judgement as to whether it should be pulled. It is a very common misapprehension among aspiring writers that their material is being stolen by professional comics on the telly or whatever; please be assured that this very rarely happens. If you hear a panellist on a topical comedy show making a similar gag to the one-liner you pasted on the submissions board, it is because any half-decent comedy brain is going to land in the same approximate area. If you had the same thought as someone who does it for a living, you are obviously on the right track, so send in some more stuff!

Thanks for your contributions and good luck!