The Tit Haller: We spoke to the mysterious face behind the satire posts

From the Kings to Girton HS3 rail, to renaming the Seeley Library to the Silly Library, the Tit Haller is Cambridge’s most recent satire paper. Amassing over 650 followers on Instagram since their first post in mid-November, the page is growing fast, and with fame, comes questions. Who exactly is The Tit Haller?

“This is my life: I do nothing else whatsoever”

The Tit Haller is a team of 10-20 writers, although everything is edited by one person, the paper’s founder. A first-year Humanities student, inspiration struck in Big Tesco, after a night of watching “Have I Got News For You.” After researching if Cambridge Uni had a satire paper and failing to find The Porter’s Log (“what’s that?”), but somehow managing to stumble across O*ford’s “The Oxymoron,” they decided to start their own.

Articles and ideas came out quickly. Their first post “HS3 to be built between Girton and Kings” gained 120 likes on Instagram – not bad for a fledgling paper. It’s only been onwards and upwards for The Tit Haller, who when asked if they had any other extracurriculars, said “this is my life, I do nothing else whatsoever.”

“The whole premise of the name is just tit, lol”

So, does The Tit Haller actually go to Tit Hall? The answer is no. After going through a list of potential names and finding none of them “rolled off the tongue,” the Tit Haller began brainstorming funny Cambridge-related things, landing on Tit Hall. In fact, they found that being a first-year at Cambridge meant they had that “brand new perspective,” and that “nothing was normal.”

It didn’t take much for them to realise that “that’s a weirdly specific Cambridge thing,” because “everything’s a weirdly specific Cambridge thing,” including running jokes that everyone else seems to know, such as “Girton far away, lol.”

We were happy to hear, though, that The Tit Haller has read some Tab articles and has found in-joke inspiration from that.

“Everyone pitches in”

Initial ideas were approved by the founder’s friends, but from there some people were contacted directly through a “you would be funny, I do this thing, would you be interested?” type message, in which everyone said yes (although some later dropped out). Applications were then opened to the public, you could message the account if you wanted to give it a go, and after this, a Google Form was put out where people could put forward an application.

Once in, everyone pitches towards ideas. The list of Union Speakers, for example, featuring famous figures like “John Claius” and “Cher Lloyd (by Cher Lloyd)” was a group effort, with ideas bouncing around their group chat, culminating in a list that was “twice as long” than the one eventually published.

Unsurprisingly, everyone on the team knows each other, and there are even plans for a social in place. When asked how they’ve managed to keep everyone’s identities secret for so long, the Tit Haller told us it’s “trust, trusting people,” plus, the only other people that know are those who have been involved.

“Whatever people want, we’ll give them”

When asked how the Tit Haller is planning to grow, the founder told us they are looking at “columns,” “video content,” although this obviously requires a “face to the whole madness,” and “cartoon-y” stuff, the first of which has already been published, in the form of a Cambridge Uni NFT collaboration.

The Tit Haller tells us that whatever people want to see, they’ll give them. “If people have any ideas,” they say, “get in contact.”

“It’s not a vanity project”

We discussed at the length the Tit Haller’s decision to keep the team’s identity anonymous: “Anonymity allows people to say what they want; it’s good to have that layer of protection there.” They insisted they never want the paper to become a kind of “vanity project,” instead they’re focusing on making people laugh while “making fun of the Cambridge bubble.”

For the Tit Haller, anonymous shouldn’t be about “saying controversial things and getting away with it” but more about being honest and critical “without worrying about personal repercussions.”

However,  if the paper gets “to a good level of notoriety, on a level with Crushbridge and Camfess”, they have considered “going on a Union President Run” with a manifesto along the lines of “I’m the Tit Haller. You know who I am –  I’ve made you laugh.” Jokingly, they claimed this would be a good reason to “deanonymize for a purpose.”

“It’s a spectrum of how important you think you are”

The satire paper has a very clear idea of its role and place within the Cambridge bubble. They claim to be on the far end of the spectrum where they “don’t want to take themselves too seriously,” making them distinct from any other Cambridge student publications you might know of.

They find that a lot of their content ends up “parodying” this “more self-important tone” you’d find at the university, because “we need to laugh at ourselves a bit.” But they insist they’re “not trying to hurt or target anyone: we can have a laugh at everyone but we try and stay on the right side of things.”

The last thing the Tit Haller says they want “is for anyone to feel like they’re upset by one of the articles.” They want people “to have a laugh and appreciate the humour and not take it too seriously.”

“The more you share it, the more people can laugh at themselves.”

As we reached the end of our conversation, we asked the Tit Haller if they had anything to say to their readers: they wanted to extend their “thanks to the readership.” They hope that people continue to enjoy and share their work so that the Tit Haller can continue to bring some humour into the Cambridge bubble.

You can read the Tit Haller’s work on their website and follow them on Instagram and Facebook. If anyone is interested in submitting articles they can email [email protected], in order to be considered for publication. 

Feature Image Credit: The Tit Haller

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