-Good to see you, Miss Vaughn.
-Hello. (laughter)
Nice to meet you, too.
-All right,
first off, for our viewers
who have not seen The Needling,
it's an online satirical website
that makes fun of pretty much everything.
-Yes. The tagline is, we're “Seattle's only real fake news.”
But a lot of people kind of refer to us as a local Onion,
which.
Yeah,
I mean, a lot of our website is basically in that style.
But we have a variety of kind of satirical articles,
mostly rooted in local humor.
But some of our contributors and myself
come up with great national headlines
that we have to put in there, too.
-Oh absolutely, there's there's so many great headlines.
I want to mention
a couple of great examples right off the top here.
“Fremont troll
priced out of Fremont, moves to Tukwila.”
-Mmhmm.
-That is so perfect.
It hits the whole thing about high rent,
high priced houses in a really funny way.
-Yeah,
but that is
one of our
sweetheart headlines that really kicked off the website.
You would be shocked how many people believed it.
Part of me goes, “Man,
we need better media literacy out there.”
And part of me goes, “I don't know,
world’s been kind of crazy.”
I can't blame people.
-Another great one.
“Shocking report finds Cle Elum
actually nowhere near Enumclaw.”
Yeah. Love that. Loved that.
-Who knew? Who knew?
And, I mean,
I love that kind of headline, too,
because it's one of those everyday things.
Honestly, you know, these
probably people who read them were like,
“Really? Oh, my gosh.”
Yeah, I do always make that mistake.
-Yeah.
It totally resonates.
I know another one, and I don't know
if you can think of it off the top of your head
to remember the title, but it's about the florist.
Do you remember the one?
-Yeah, “Local woman
just thinks flaming forest could find more peaceful way
to protest climate change.”
I came up with that one in a really hard week.
It was like one of those weeks
where it didn't just feel like
we were living through a dumpster fire.
It literally looked like
we were living in a dumpster fire.
There was no escape from the bad news.
You couldn't take a walk outside
and not think about it for 10 minutes.
So that that one kind of, like,
got what everybody was feeling that week.
-You launched The Needling in 2018.
-Yeah. Yeah.
-So where did you get the idea that you could do this?
You were able to do this.
-Uhm, you know
the funny thing about my whole background is
when I first joined, like my high school newspaper,
I didn't like a lot of the
formulaic way that news is delivered,
and I wanted to make fun of it,
and I thought I was going to sneak
jokes into our high school newspaper.
But then I actually caught the real journalism bug
and ended up becoming like a journalist,
like a pretty well accomplished journalist that
I've been at The Seattle Times and The L.A.
Times. Yeah, I have had my reporting on NPR.
So I really went all the way with journalism.
The real news.
-You were part of The Seattle Times team,
the one little thing I like to call a Pulitzer Prize
for the mudslide
series.
So I just want everyone to know
that, yeah, not only are you good, you're like a Pulitzer
Prize winning good.
So...
-Yeah, I spent about two weeks out there reporting on that.
And honestly, it's like part of why
I'm also in the satire right now is, is sometimes
difficult news is, you know, it's hard to process.
You don't want to take your eyes off
the difficult tragedies
that are going on in our world.
But how can you take a look at that
and keep your eye on it without constantly
being emotionally drained by it...
You know,
constantly feeling like you're getting this gut punch.
And I think comedy can help with that.
-Definitely.
What makes a good headline and what makes a good story?
Because it's not just the headline.
You also write the story.
-Yeah, well, from the outset, we're not making fun of people
that are already experiencing a hard time in life.
You know,
if we're going to be making fun of people, it's
going to be people in power,
people who've got it coming because of the way
they've exploited people or their power.
So that's a major thing first.
And then being concise is good... that that's a challenge.
You know,
it's really like get the attention of people online,
It needs to be like that --
Concise. Yeah.
-”Quarantine haircut qualifies as both self-care
and self-harm.”
-Yes. One of our main contributors came up with that one.
And just that same week I had two friends
that it had to happen.
I'm like, We need this PSA out there now.
-Now there's one that is I love
and it got a massive amount of attention.
“New study confirms cats can't spread
COVID-19, but would if given option”
Okay.
Unbelievably funny.
And it went viral.
So tell me about how.
-Yeah. Yeah, that was like a big lesson.
Like a before that moment,
it’s like sometimes when you have a story
that gets shared, like, 200 times on Facebook
that you're like, well, it kind of went viral.
You're like, Oh, that's a big deal.
This one went like, real,
like international, like, and what sucked is like,
somebody kind of stole our content.
They took like a screenshot of our
our image in our headline and didn't give us credit.
(hissing cat) One cool thing that we got out of that,
though, was Jerry Seinfeld's wife shared it, without credit,
and then we asked for credit and then at least she was able
to give us credit to a bunch of really cool
comedians who liked it, like Ali Wong and Neil Brennan
and and her husband, Jerry Seinfeld.
So that was like, “whoa.”
And then for some reason, like First Lady
Laura Bush started following us,
And I saw her like like, you know, posting
like “this is crazy.” (giggling)
-That is so great.
That's why...
Yeah, I just love it.
Well, Lex, thanks so much for
for talking with me and more than anything.
Thank you for upping the laugh quotient in the world.
Certainly in my household, we enjoy The Needling so much.
It's just great.
Keep keep on going strong.
-Thank you.
It's such an honor to speak with somebody else
who was a big part of the Seattle comedy scene. And
another former
satire, ‘Almost Live!”, it’s an honor to speak with you too.
-Oh, great, great.
It’s fun to talk comedy.
I always like talking comedy. All right girlie, take care.
Yes. Lots of laughs await you at theneedling.com.
Also, The Needling Update,
a brand new podcast is scheduled to launch on Friday,
February 5th.