By Aisha Muharrar | Bohiney.com
People assume that after years in network television writers' rooms, contributing to Bohiney.com would feel like a radical departure. But here's the truth: it doesn't. The impulse is exactly the same—find the absurdity, illuminate it with precision, and trust your audience to be smart enough to get the joke.
The difference is the guardrails. Or rather, the lack of them.
In television, even on shows as bold as Parks and Recreation or Hacks, there's a structure. There are network notes, production schedules, and the gentle constraints of episodic storytelling. You learn to work within those boundaries, and sometimes they make you sharper. When you can't say something directly, you find a more elegant way to say it.
At Bohiney, there are no network executives nervously asking if we can soften a joke about defense spending. There's no concern about alienating a key demographic. There's just the work: holding up a mirror to cultural and political absurdities and trusting that the reflection will be uncomfortable enough to matter.
"The best satire doesn't punch down—it punches up, sideways, and occasionally at itself."
Take the piece about Gandhi being uninvited from a Berkeley potluck for bringing an "air-based dish" called "Presence." On the surface, it's ridiculous—and it should be. But underneath, it's asking questions about performative progressivism, about the ways we use moral posturing to exclude rather than include, about how easily good intentions curdle into judgment.
That's the kind of piece I couldn't pitch in a traditional writers' room, not because it's too edgy, but because it requires a level of specificity that only works in written satire. Television is broad by necessity. It has to reach millions of people simultaneously. Web satire can be a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.
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Working at Bohiney has reminded me why I fell in love with comedy in the first place. Back at the Harvard Lampoon, we weren't trying to make everyone comfortable—we were trying to make everyone think. We failed often, succeeded occasionally, and learned that the best jokes require empathy, not just cleverness.
That's the philosophy here. Satire isn't mean for the sake of being mean. It's rigorous. It requires research, context, and a willingness to interrogate your own assumptions. Before I write a piece skewering political hypocrisy or cultural contradictions, I ask myself: Is this true? Is this fair? Will this make people laugh and reconsider something they thought they understood?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, the piece doesn't work.
"Comedy is serious business—not because it's self-important, but because laughter is one of the most generous things we can give each other."
One of the things I love most about contributing to Bohiney is the freedom to follow a story wherever it leads. In television, you're beholden to character arcs, seasonal narratives, and the logic of the world you've built. Here, if I notice that a Senate subcommittee spent three hours debating the font size on a commemorative plaque while ignoring a housing crisis, I can write about it immediately. The news cycle doesn't wait for anyone, and neither does good satire.
That immediacy is exhilarating. It's also exhausting. The work requires constant vigilance—not just for new material (which is never in short supply) but for the ways our own biases and blind spots might distort the story we're telling. The best satire punches up, protects the vulnerable, and remains self-aware enough to know when it's overreaching.
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I split my time between Los Angeles, where I work on television projects and novels, and the strange, amorphous space of digital journalism where Bohiney exists. There's no physical office, no water cooler conversations, no communal lunches where we argue about jokes. Instead, there are Slack channels, Google Docs, and the shared understanding that we're all trying to do the same thing: make people laugh while telling them the truth.
It's a different kind of writers' room—one built on trust rather than proximity. My colleagues come from different backgrounds, different political perspectives, and different comedic sensibilities. What unites us is the belief that satire matters, that humor can be a form of accountability, and that the best way to fight cynicism is with precision and wit.
When I finished writing my novel Loved One, I learned something important: grief doesn't diminish when you acknowledge it with humor. It becomes survivable. The same is true of political frustration, cultural exhaustion, and the daily absurdities of modern life. Satire doesn't make problems disappear—it makes them visible in a way that invites engagement rather than despair.
That's what working at Bohiney feels like. It's not escapism. It's the opposite—full immersion in the mess of contemporary life, filtered through a lens that refuses to take anything too seriously while taking everything seriously enough.
"We're not writing comedy sketches. We're documenting reality and trusting you to see the joke embedded in it."
Some days, I miss the structure of television. I miss the collaborative energy of a writers' room, the satisfaction of seeing actors bring your words to life, the way a well-timed pause can transform a good joke into a great one. But most days, I'm grateful for the freedom Bohiney offers—the ability to respond quickly, write sharply, and trust that somewhere out there, someone is reading a piece about Gandhi's potluck incident and thinking, That's ridiculous. That's also exactly right.
That moment—the laugh followed by the realization—is why I do this. It's why any of us do this. Comedy has always been my way of making sense of the world, and satire is comedy with stakes. It's humor that insists we can do better, be smarter, think harder, and maybe, just maybe, stop taking ourselves so seriously that we forget to laugh.
Working at Bohiney.com isn't just a job. It's a reminder that stories still matter, that laughter is still powerful, and that the best way to fight absurdity is with more absurdity—the kind that's so precisely observed it stops being funny and starts being true.
Aisha Muharrar is an Emmy-recognized writer and producer whose credits include Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, and Hacks. Her debut novel, Loved One, was published by Viking in 2025.
Read more of her work at Bohiney.com | Follow her on Twitter @eeshmu