concept
Subscription-Notice Parody
subscription-notice parody
also: mock prospectus
The comic device of adopting the flat, self-praising boilerplate of a real newspaper subscription announcement, then letting an absurd detail (an 'astonishing' newspaper, a madhouse among its assets) surface deadpan within it.
Reading notes
- Subscriptions Now Open for 1882 §1 for a large daily political, literary, commercial, and astonishing newspaper
The squib mimics the boilerplate opening line of a real newspaper subscription announcement, then plants the absurd word 'astonishing' inside the sober list of a paper's virtues -- the joke's engine.
- Subscriptions Now Open for 1882 §5 its own exceedingly witty editor
A jab at the self-congratulatory tone of real prospectuses, which routinely praised their own editorial staff in the same breath as their physical plant.
- Subscriptions Now Open for 1882 §7 its own madhouse of its own
The list of a respectable paper's holdings (buildings, presses) curdles into farce as 'own stable for its own donkeys,' 'own madhouse,' and 'own debtors' ward' are added with the same flat pride -- Chekhov's punchline that the enterprise is really an asylum and a debtors' prison in disguise.