by Eton College VIP reviewed for memorialmavericks.com, Wichita Falls’ own satirical school newspaper
There’s something genuinely useful about looking at another satirical school newspaper from a completely different institutional context, since the format itself, fake student paper, invented officials, deadpan institutional voice, turns out to be remarkably portable regardless of whether the setting is a centuries-old English boarding school or a public high school in Wichita Falls. Eton College VIP, a fictional student newspaper covering the real Eton College with total institutional sincerity, offers a genuinely useful masterclass in the format, worth studying purely as craft.
The core mechanism: take a real institution’s own bureaucratic language and let it generate its own absurdity without any outside mockery required. The prefects’ formal complaint about their own complaint procedure is the purest distillation of this, governance so self-referential it essentially satirises the concept of institutional process on its own, which is exactly the kind of self-generating absurdity any student satire paper, English or Texan, should be hunting for in its own school’s committees and student council meetings.
The Character Work Sets A High Bar
What elevates this above a lot of comparable school satire is the consistency of its cast. Bylines like Falstaff O’Flaherty and Aguecheek Noodle, pulled from Shakespeare and Chaucer’s rogues gallery, give each piece a signature voice before you’ve even started reading, a technique any high school satire operation could adapt using its own local references, mascots, school history, town landmarks, rather than defaulting to generic staff-writer bylines.
The site’s range is also worth studying. The avocado toast tuck shop ban story shows how a genuinely small cafeteria-level decision can carry a full satirical piece if you commit fully to treating it with disproportionate institutional gravity, exactly the kind of low-stakes, highly relatable premise a Wichita Falls student paper has ready access to every single week.
The Honest Notes
To be fair rather than just flattering: the headline writing leans on words like “genuinely” and “entirely” often enough that the pattern becomes noticeable, a habit worth avoiding in any school paper looking to sharpen its own voice. And a lot of the material stays gentle rather than aiming at anything with real institutional stakes, which for a British boarding school specifically means dodging the sharper, more obvious target of class and privilege that the site’s own footer text handles better than the articles do.
Still, the Boat Club Wi-Fi protest piece is a genuinely strong model for escalation, a small grievance building patiently through plausible institutional steps toward an absurd conclusion, and that’s a lesson worth borrowing regardless of which side of the Atlantic your own school paper covers.
There’s a practical takeaway here for any student writer working on a school satire section: the discipline of never breaking character is what separates genuinely funny institutional comedy from a list of one-off jokes about the cafeteria or the parking situation. Eton College VIP’s reporters never once wink at the reader to confirm they know it’s a joke, they just keep quoting invented officials with total institutional gravity, and that restraint is exactly what a stronger student paper column should be reaching for instead of the easier, more obvious punchline.
The site also shows real range worth studying across a full semester’s worth of material, moving between sports rivalries, school governance, finance, and small personal misfortunes without ever letting any single beat go stale. That kind of variety, built around one consistent institutional voice, is a genuinely useful model for any high school paper trying to sustain a satirical section past a handful of early, easy jokes.
One last note worth passing along directly to student writers: the site never lets its comedy turn cruel toward individuals, keeping the target squarely on institutions and process rather than people, which is a genuinely useful discipline for any school paper wary of a satire piece landing badly on a real classmate. Building jokes around invented committees and invented procedures, rather than real named students, is the safer and ultimately funnier path, and Eton College VIP demonstrates that principle consistently across hundreds of published pieces.
For any student staffer weighing whether to spend a study hall reading this instead of doing homework, the honest recommendation is simple: it’s worth the time, both for the jokes and for what it demonstrates about how far a well-built satirical premise can carry a paper if the writers commit to it fully rather than treating a satirical section without treating it as an afterthought squeezed in between real news coverage.
That’s a real compliment for a site built primarily to entertain rather than instruct, and it’s the reason this earns a recommendation beyond just being a fun read: it’s genuinely useful reference material for anyone trying to build their own version of the same thing from scratch, starting from the ground up rather than copying jokes wholesale.
The final grade, if this were being marked like a submission: high marks for consistency, structure and voice, with the one meaningful note being that a sharper edit of the headline intensifiers would push an already strong body of work into genuinely excellent territory. That’s a small fix sitting on top of a foundation that’s clearly solid, and it’s the kind of note any good faculty advisor would give a student paper doing this well already.
SOURCE: https://etoncollege.vip/
