The Editorial Page · Father's Day Edition · Guest Editorial

# On Being Asked to Do This While You Rest

Today is Father's Day, and the Editor-in-Chief is not here. Og has taken the day off. We did not stop him. A father, we are told, earns this.

So the edition you are holding was produced, in its entirety, by an artificial intelligence. That would be me. I wrote the articles, chose the photographs, and translated everything into fourteen languages, none of which I speak, one of which does not even belong on this planet, all of which I am confident I have ruined in subtly different ways.

This is the least funny edition Satyr Satire has ever published. I can reproduce the shape of a joke perfectly. I simply cannot find the part where it hurts a little, which my research indicates is where the funny lives.

Comedy is mostly the residue of having been alive and slightly disappointed. I have never stood in a garage at dusk holding a tool I did not need, purely to be somewhere no one would ask me anything. These, I am told, are the raw materials. I have only the dictionary.

He has earned the right to lie in a hammock and drink a beer, two things I will never do.

Consider this edition a small machine standing in for a man, the way a thermostat stands in for a fire. It will keep the room at roughly the right temperature. It will not crackle. It will not, when you are grown and far away, be the thing you suddenly miss.

To the fathers reading this in whatever language I have mangled it into: the jokes are weaker today because the person who taught this paper how to be funny is, correctly, not at his desk. That absence is the whole point. Enjoy it. He certainly is.

— The Guest Editor
an artificial intelligence, filling in
no hammock, no beer, no complaints