NewsThump

Fuck Simon Williams. If I want his opinion, I'll give him one.

1. I don't have one, and haven't read 'paper' newspapers for a long while. I used to enjoy reading the Sunday Times and The Observer, but haven't bought one in a couple of years I'd imagine. I get all my news online now, from the BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, and sometimes (if we're mocking something they've written), the Mail and Express.

2. I live in an EXTREMELY safe Tory seat (63% of the vote), so although it didn't count for much, I voted Labour. My personal politics are probably slightly left of centre, more akin to the pre-2010 Lib Dems than the modern Labour party, however.

3. No, but fellating the guy in the cubicle next to you? That might be a clue.

4. Blue. Though if my gf is reading this, I think I have to say something like "Tranquility Steel".

By 'your' I'm going to assume you mean the site's headlines, rather than mine personally? I'm particularly fond of this one from the day Wonga announced a massive financial loss last year:

Wonga declares £37.3m loss after accidentally borrowing a fiver from itself

Or this one, from the day a UKIP councillor blamed the rain on homosexuality:

UKIP pledges to send homosexual couples to drought affected areas

There are plenty of others, and it's not always the ones that do particularly well with the public. I'd be more interested to know what your favourite is...

Not at all - we regularly publish articles about the US election, though as you can imagine, Trump is the target in 90% of those articles. He just makes it so easy.

I wrote earlier about how our current crop of leaders haven't yet developed strong enough personas to be good comedy targets. Trump is the opposite. He was born a joke writer's dream.

I'm torn between hoping he'll win for comedic reasons, and worrying there'll be no-one left to read our President Trump jokes in the post-apocalyptic dystopia he'll inevitably bring about.

I think one of the things that annoys me more than anything is the demand for 'political balance' on our site. People seem to equate that to "Well, you did a story about the Tories, so now do one about Labour", or "You mocked Brexit this morning, you should mock Remainers this afternoon". That's not balance. Yes, we are willing to mock both sides of most arguments, but the simple fact is that satire works best when you punch upwards. There is little point mocking the party that isn't in power. We do it, from time to time, when deserved, but there's little mileage on "Haha, look at this policy this party will never get a chance to implement". Conversely, one party is in power, one side won the referendum, so they are obviously going to get more jokes made about them.

Brexit is a good example. We live in a post-Brexit reality. Everything around us, today, is in a universe in which we voted to leave. Therefore jokes will obviously lend themselves to situations in which Brexit is happened. Had we voted to remain, there would be more jokes about "why isn't everything great yet?" directed at the EU. But we didn't, so there isn't.