Bumf: Private Eye Cuttings

Overview
Bumf: Private Eye Cuttings is an anthology of the magazine's sharpest, funniest and most scabrous items assembled under the editorship of Alan Coren and Richard Ingrams. The book collects short pieces, parodies, faux reports and satirical sketches that originally ran in Private Eye, preserving the magazine's distinctive voice and mischievous outlook. It reads like a rapid-fire tour through British public life as seen by a publication that delights in exposing pomposity and mendacity.
The selection showcases the magazine's knack for turning small absurdities into barbed, sustained ridicule. The tone moves quickly between arch understatement and explosive mockery, with Coren's own contributions threaded through as a consistently witty, conversational presence. The result is both a sampler of regular columns and a concentrated hit of the magazine's editorial temperament.

Content and Style
Pieces range from brief one-liners and mock headlines to short satirical features and imagined interviews. The writing favors economical jokes, deadpan faux-respectability and clever reversals that expose hypocrisy or plain stupidity. Parody and pastiche are frequent tools: public statements are rephrased into grotesque literalness, while official prose is deflated by absurdist footnotes or imagined responses.
Cartoons, caption jokes and short sketches give the book a varied texture, so the reader shifts fluidly between visual gags and tightly written prose. The humor is rooted in specificity; a single clinching detail will often turn an otherwise ordinary paragraph into a memorable comic sting.

Themes and Targets
The primary targets are the powerful and self-important: politicians, bureaucrats, tabloid editors and public figures who thrive on spin. The book makes a consistent sport of exposing pretence, whether dressed up as managerial language, legal bluster or celebrity nonsense. It also rails against institutional complacency, media, the courts, corporate Britain, turning routine language into evidence of absurd priorities.
Underlying the satire is a sharp sense of moral outrage coupled with comic pleasure. Jokes land not merely to humiliate but to reveal a mismatch between public rhetoric and private reality. The mood can oscillate between cheeky and acerbic, with a clear affection for plain common sense as a corrective to official nonsense.

Voices and Contributors
Alan Coren's editorial presence gives the collection a lively, conversational through-line; his pieces often employ genial mockery and gentle logical traps to lull readers into a punchline. Richard Ingrams' influence is felt in the selection and in the magazine's characteristic editorial sneer, an unblinking readiness to skewering pretension. Regular Private Eye contributors, represented throughout the book, provide a chorus of satirical techniques from parody to outright surrealism.
The variety of voices keeps the collection fresh: a reader moves from burlesque obituaries to lampoons of corporate prose to stagey mock-investigations, all held together by a shared appetite for exposing nonsense.

Legacy and Appeal
As a snapshot of 1980s British satire, the book captures both the era's political controversies and the long-running contempt for overwrought public language. Its targets remain recognisable, and much of the humor still lands thanks to the timelessness of hypocrisy as comic material. For readers who enjoy tart, economical satire and an adversarial tone toward authority, the collection is both entertaining and corrosively satisfying.
The anthology also functions as a time capsule, offering contemporary readers a concentrated taste of Private Eye's editorial ferocity. It rewards repeated reading, since many of the pieces are short and sharply etched, calling attention to the craft of satire as much as to its immediate targets.