I could have no real complaints. I knew what I was getting myself into when I joined. The chicken is just one part of a proud (if eccentric) tradition in British tabloid journalism: of stunts and jokes, mascots, and animal rescues. Many senior reporters cut their teeth inside a silly suit.

My managing editor at the Mirror, Aiden McGurran, had joined the paper as “Lenny Lottery”—poached from the rival red top (so called because the name of the tabloid is emblazoned against a red background) The Sun in 1997. McGurran, who went on to become a Labour councillor, had even legally changed his name to “Mr. Lottery” in 1994 and was something of an icon. At the time, more than 20 million people were tuning in to watch the National Lottery draw on a Saturday night. Such was the importance of McGurran’s transfer to the Mirror, it ended up in the High Court when The Sun took the Mirror to court for his outfit, and he was ordered to hand back his lucky trademark suit to his former employer, which had replaced him with its new National Lottery mascot, Sir Lenny Lottery.

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This is the world of the British red tops: The Sun, the Mirror, and the Daily Star. It is a world almost completely alien to the United States, save, perhaps, New York City, with its rivalry between the Daily News and the Post. In their heyday, each of the British red tops was read by millions, bringing their proprietors and editors real political power and celebrity (and, of course, profits). (The numbers now are way down, the Mirror and Star in the hundreds of thousands, and The Sun hurtling toward the 1 million mark.) They reported the news, but also made you laugh. They didn’t take themselves too seriously. It was all a game.

This gets at the core difference between the British and American media: Britain’s newspapers—partisan, irreverent, aggressive—are closer to American TV, while British TV is closer to American newspapers. American journalism is widely seen in the United Kingdom as highbrow, but boring and verging on earnest.

As the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has noted of the English, the greatest sin of all—true in journalism as in life—is earnestness. In a recent study of Boris Johnson, O’Toole wrote how the anthropologist Kate Fox, in her book Watching the English, suggested that “a crucial rule of the national discourse is what she called The Importance of Not Being Earnest.” She wrote: “At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of ‘earnestness.’” Join in with the banter; go along with the joke—whatever you do, don’t take yourself too seriously.

Read: A tabloid changes course—and could change Britain

This is the culture that gives us the Mirror chicken. It is the culture that saw two tabloids—The Sun and the Star—enter into a donkey war to save an apparently abused Spanish donkey named Blackie in 1987. The Star claimed that in a festival in the Spanish village of Villanueva de la Vera, the fattest local would ride a donkey until it collapsed from exhaustion (an allegation denied by the Spanish ambassador).