Unless you’ve been hiding from the Internet over the past month, you’ll have noticed a surge in The Syrup Trap articles filling up your social feeds. Like ”Vancouver ranked the most city in the world” maybe. Or “TransLink unveils tiny bus program” perhaps. Or the latest (and maybe greatest?) “North Korea releases fifth album”.
The Syrup Trap, for those unaware, is fast becoming Canada’s finest humour site – no small feat for a group of recent UBC grads with zero budget and the real-world to suddenly deal with. But they’ve tackled issues as varied as NHL violence to ramped gentrification with a light-hearted satire that’s actually funny, and earning growing legion of readers in the process. The National Post’s Tristin Hopper recently tweeted, “@CBCPunchline gets $1000s in federal dollars and sucks... hard. @SyrupTrap makes nothing and is wicked funny.”
Westender spoke to the Syrup Trap’s founder and editor-in-chief, Nick Zarzycki, about the role of satire in media, evolving reading habits online, and the importance of never taking yourself too seriously.
How did the Syrup Trap come about?
I basically discovered there was this thing called college humour [magazines] that many colleges in the United States have, where people can go to write silly things and have a lot of fun. I thought that would be really cool to have at UBC, so I decided to start a humour magazine.
I started publishing things on the website that I threw together in three days and people started contacting me. Eventually it became this thing on campus that we continued doing.
What was the response on campus originally?
I think maybe our second or third post – it was an article about UBC moving to Toronto to become a prestigious university. Or something like that. The interesting thing about satirical publications, particularly in the early stages when they’re not very good, a lot of their articles can be misinterpreted as being real news. They’re not so much funny as they are misleading, so I think we misled quite a few people in the early stages, and we actually got quite a bit of traffic right at the beginning. It really took off immediately, and that encouraged us to go, OK, if we can do more than mislead people, maybe we can also make them laugh.
There were a couple articles that did particularly well. I think our most successful still to date is a fake letter from the dean of the Sauder School of Business firing all of his quote-unquote employees, aka students, for their reaction to the rape chants scandal at UBC. Basically, it’s a fake letter that he sent saying, “Listen, you guys just handled this terribly. You’re all fired.”
Again, it wasn’t particularly well-labeled as satire, so I think what happened was, we came to the conclusion that the entire Canadian business community passed it around as a real letter, and it got something like 70,000 unique visitors.
That’s a really tricky game to play.
It is, yeah.
Was that a steep learning curve, finding that balance between presenting satire in a way that’s obviously satire, versus satire that’s just confusing?
The internal discussion we’re always having is, how can we make sure what we’re doing isn’t just clickbait? The solution we’ve come to is, and what we’ve been doing at least for the last couple of months, is ensuring that there’s at least a joke in the headline. If there’s no joke in the headline, if the headline doesn’t make you laugh – and if someone has to click on it to figure out the joke, if there even is one – then that’s clickbait and it’s real satire. The headline has to make you laugh, and the headline has to be silly in some way.
Let’s take the article about Stephen Harper refusing to answer questions about his cape. Having looked at the reaction of that piece, I’d say about maybe about 25 per cent of people reacting to that article online still think it’s real. The Photoshop job is quite well done, and there are people out there that think Stephen Harper legitimately wore a cape to question period. That’s bumped up the views and it’s bumped up our audience.
But the majority of people are laughing at it, playing along with the joke, and it’s kind of obvious from the beginning that this is something silly someone has written.
Getting jokes in the headline – and I’m guilty of this too – people are going to laugh and they might not click through the article at all. They’ve gotten the joke already.
But they might share it, though. I’m not interested so much in click through as I am interested in people showing it to their friends, you know?
Your recent articles seem to have expanded the focus past UBC and are now looking outward at Vancouver and the rest of Canada. What’s your ambition here?
We want a Canadian audience. That’s the goal. We have an audience here at UBC and we’ll continue publishing pieces that are, if not directly about UBC, then are at least about campus and college life.
But I graduated from UBC last year. I’m not actually there anymore, so writing about more general stuff that appeals to a general Canadian audience is one way to stay enthusiastic about this thing. I’m no longer a student and I no longer care about stuff that’s happening on campus. A lot of us are graduating, and a lot of us see that there’s an appetite for silly writing [in Canada[. The ambition is to get more of a national audience and see how big we can make this.
Why do satire at all? Why not humorous criticism of real Canadian issues, similar to what John Oliver does?
One thing I like about the group of people that’s doing this, and one thing I like about our meetings and our discussions and the jokes that come out of them, is we don’t like taking ourselves too seriously. We don’t see ourselves as overtly political. It’s pretty obvious that, on balance, the writers for The Syrup Trap are left-leaning liberals, and if we do make any kind of statements or value judgements in our articles, it’s going to slant that way.
But overall, the goal here is to write silly jokes that will make people laugh. That is the number one goal, regardless of what else we do. That’s why we don’t engage with issues more directly. The goal is to be silly and funny, and one way we benefit from that is it allows us to incorporate a broader range of voices in the writing room. There are people in The Syrup Trap that would describe themselves as right of center, and I don’t think that’s possible at a publication that’s overtly political and has to choose between being a leftist or a rightist publication.
Do you think Canadians have a particular sense of humour?
I think they do. I don’t know if a year of looking at reactions to our pieces qualifies me to make an assessment, but there’s this article in Vanity Fair from about a year ago that talks about whether or not Canadians have a particular sense of humour.
Two things come to mind. One is that it’s very similar to the American one since we grew up with American culture and stuff, but one thing that struck me is the Canadian sense of humour is a lot more gentle or subtle. Canadians don’t deal with meanness as well as Americans. I couldn’t give you an example of that, or prove it in anyway, but I think there is a gentleness and subtleness to Canadian humour.
I guess you can contrast how The Onion will tackle a subject, verses how the Syrup Trap might. The Onion can be mean-spirited and kind of depressing.
Absolutely. When you look at interviews with Onion writers, and when they describe the character that they’re playing when they write Onion pieces, the first thing they say is, “This is someone who is extremely mean who hates their audience now.”
That’s another thing we struggle with. A lot of people say, oh hey, it’s a Canadian version of the Onion. One way we’re trying to be different than them is, I think, we’re trying to be sillier than they are. They’re meaner and more pointed, whereas we want to be a bit more silly.
Is it your group of writers that cultivate that silliness, or is it something else?
It’s the group of people. It’s absolutely the group of people that are here. Yeah, I think so.
We have quite a few talented writers on staff who are genuinely funny people, and that’s what you try to do when you start a publications is find talented people who have a voice or, in the case of comedy, are actually funny.
One thing I’d also say, when you write satire and fake news, there’s a way of testing that what you’re writing is good. At meetings, we do what the Onion does. We bring our headline pitches to the meeting and read them out to the rest of the group. If the group laughs out loud, we use it. If they don’t, we discard. It’s a very simple testing system.
