Reductress Takes Its Satirical Voice Beyond the Internet

Stumbling unaware into a standup show is a mistake New York City tourists make daily. But at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea, on the second Thursday of January, audience members did not seem confused as to why they were sipping beer in a dark cellar, awaiting the first act of the monthly comedy night staged by Reductress, the soon-to-be four-year-old satirical online magazine. The self-selecting crowd appeared, like the site’s readership, to be made up of liberal-minded women.

“That does mean we have to castrate all men before they leave the basement,” Nicole Silverberg, the website’s associate editor, said before introducing the performers, who included writers from “Broad City,” “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The crowd could take a joke. But online, some people still don’t get Reductress, which Sarah Pappalardo and Beth Newell started as a blog in April 2013 and which now receives more than one million unique views a month. In a segment that she calls “Meet the Commenters,” Ms. Silverberg highlights the unconversant readers who troll the site’s social channels, asking where they can find the (nonexistent) print edition, questioning the objectivity of its “reporting” and more.

“We have certain articles that sort of eclipse our normal readership, and that’s when we’ll start to get a flooding in of people who a) don’t understand what it is that we do and are not aware that it’s satire, or b) are very hateful of whatever idea we’re trying to communicate,” Ms. Silverberg, 26, said after the show, which she hosts.

That the site registers as sincere to some readers could be seen as a mark of its skill, akin to Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, retweeting The Onion. Reductress’s editors excel at parodying lifestyle articles (beauty tips, first-person experiences, personality quizzes — anything you might find in the pages of Cosmopolitan or on Bustle). At the same time, mistaking humor for journalism may be a sign of the times, as fake news continues to thrive online.