Satire

When:

Lookups spiked on January 7, 2015.

Why:

The deadly attack on the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was an attack on free speech and freedom of the press. The sometimes coarse cartoons published by the magazine deliberately courted controversy with satire.

Satire means "humor that shows the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc." or "a way of using humor to show that someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc." It comes from the Latin word for satirical poetry that probably originally meant "dish of mixed ingredients."

The paper's name translates to "Charlie Weekly"; Hebdo is short for hebdomadaire, the French word meaning "weekly."