“Mayor Ford Unveils Bold New Double Vision for Toronto,” proclaimed the headline.
“We’re gonna totally end this fucking gravy train, lower taxes, and take our cars and just … and just go,’” Ford was reported yelling during an “impromptu press conference,” held for a couple walking their dog.
One can only hope that the embattled mayor of our city has not actually been reduced to such a state and, at least for the moment, that hope would be vindicated. The aforementioned headline and quote are excerpted from an article by The Beaverton, a rising force in the field of Canadian satirical news.
Having been generally focused on maintaining its online presence for the past few months, The Beaverton is set to produce its third print copy this April.
“I’ve always loved The Onion,” says Laurent Noonan, founder of The Beaverton, in reference to what is arguably the most famous satirical news publication. “But they didn’t really do Canadian humour, so long-term it’s just creating an equivalent of The Onion for Canada, so people aren’t just reading The Onion online; they’re enjoying some homemade comedy covering Canadian stories.”
While much of its content is specifically geared to Canadian audiences, poking fun at the confusing realm of politics in Canada, The Beaverton also frequently runs pieces on pressing international developments. One of The Beaverton’s latest headlines read, “Pope Francis Really Hoping New Job Will Finally Get Him Laid.”
Unfortunately, the publication has run into some challenges as it attempts to grow.
“The thing about fake news is it’s not search-engine friendly, so no one’s ever going to search for one of our articles. People land on our articles by accident,” Noonan explains. “The struggle is the brand-building.”
The Beaverton has achieved some notable successes in the last five months, with several of its articles going viral on social media sites like Reddit and Facebook. “The problem is sometimes a lot of people really like an article, but they don’t necessarily share it on their wall. People will read it, and we get a lot of feedback like this. They’ll like it, but don’t share it on their own social media, so it doesn’t go much further than that.”
Vanessa Purdy, a U of T alumna and writer for The Beaverton, notes that one of the main roadblocks is simply “people not being open to it, or people thinking we don’t really need a Canadian satirical publication.”
“I think it’s important to have a Canadian satirical voice,” she adds.
The Beaverton’s humour is close to unfailingly on point, with pieces ranging from ridiculous (“Turns Out Angry Neighbour Just Had a Mouthful of Bees”), to biting (the Ford story described above), to pedantic enough that you can laugh at them really insistently in order to demonstrate to your friends how educated you are (a cartoon depicting a bull asking a bear in an office, “So you’re my replacement?” and the bear responding drily, “Beats me… Nobody explains anything around here”).
Those involved with the publication take particular pride in how clever their “reporters” are. “Our writers are quite talented,” Noonan says. “We have two that are lawyers, one is an engineer, one is a doctor, lots of university students and graduates, so really smart people on board. It gives us a good feeling that we’re on to something.”
Moving forward, The Beaverton plans to expand its readership through a variety of means. “We want to try to have more distribution points across city, to have places people know they can get it,” Purdy explains.
“We want to try to get it on campus,” she adds, but acknowledges the difficulty of doing so, given the fact that the publication is not officially affiliated with U of T.
But the key to success for the growing satirical paper may be the social media that has helped it achieve its current levels of circulation.
“We just meet people on the street, tell them what we’re all about, that we’re Canadian comedy writers,” Noonan says. “People like to support you once they’ve met you. By virtue of sharing things on our Facebook page with our friends, sometimes they share them and then it starts to spread. If it’s really good, we’ve just got to get it out there on social media pages and then it just takes off across the Internet.
“Sometimes I’ll dress up as a beaver and I’ll go on the street with some of the other writers.”
Noonan emphasizes the unique niche he is trying to fill with his project. “Right now, there’s not really anything like us that’s trying to bring a Canadian satirical newspaper,” he states. “Things have gone well in the last five months because we are doing more timely stuff, and doing Canadian stuff. There’s not really anything else out there that’s covering a lot of Canadian current events stories.”
“The point of what we’re trying to do is get people talking about Canadian news in a different way,” says Purdy. “Whether or not it’s coming from Beaverton is not as important to me as that the idea is out there and people are talking about it.”
The Beaverton can be found at thebeaverton.com. The publication is definitely worth a look for anybody seeking a source for smart, incisive humour.
And that is “humour” with a “u.”
