Fun

Onion Headline Writers Insist: Laugh At Us! We’re Still Funny!

Here’s a headline from CNN: “Trump Vigorously Defends Kenosha Shooter As Racist White Supremacist.” The story starts:

WASHINGTON—Taking a firm stand ahead of his visit to the Wisconsin, President Donald Trump vigorously defended Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse Tuesday as a racist white supremacist. “People are taking his actions completely out of context, but you’ve got to realize this kid was a brave racist who crossed state lines to kill and injure Black Lives Matter activists,” said Trump, echoing the opinion being expressed by many popular voices across conservative media and suggesting that the shooter merely wanted to protect white America.

Well, that’s the way they talk these days at CNN. And the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, NPR, and on and on. And on some more. We even get similar things from Fox, NRO, and other neo-conman outlets.

Except, as clever readers will already have guessed, this isn’t CNN, but The Onion.

The Onion used to be funny, their satire witty and clever, though not, as cannibal said at the feast, not always in the best of taste. They were so good at parodying “news” that people used to have to append “Not the Onion” to true wacky headlines so people wouldn’t think they were being tricked.

Take “Study: Depression Hits Losers Hardest”, or “Sperm Cells Unaware They’re Swimming Up Large Intestine” (yes), “‘Celebrities Are The Real Heroes’, Says Fireman”.

All gone.

Here are all four of the headlines suggested under the hilarious Trump story: “Yankees Fans Pack Stadium For Asshole Heritage Night”, “Akon Unveils Plans For $6 Billion ‘Futuristic City'”, “Iowa State To Allow 25,000 Fans Into Stadium For Football Game”, “Vermonter Disgusted After Getting Glimpse Of Topless Bridge Out In Public”.

Did you laugh? Giggle? Smile, even?

The leading photo is a screenshot from the main page last Thursday night. Some of the other gut-busting headlines were: “Economists Warn Americans That Money Withering To Ash In Their Hands Could Be Sign Of Recession”, “Child Beauty Experts Recommend Revitalizing Skin With Elmer’s Glue Peel”, “Raytheon Engineers Announce Successful Test Of New Drone On Mice”.

The best thing that can be said about their then-lead article “Spotify Celebrates 100th Dollar Given To Artists” was that it was mildly amusing.

While I admit to smiling at “Excited Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Sign Deal With Netflix To Access Thousands Of Films, TV Shows For Just $8.99 A Month”, the remaining efforts don’t even reach the base mirth mark of “cute”.

How about politics? Surely they can find something funny about Joe Biden. The headlines write themselves! Like my hair, here are some just off the top of my head: “Campaign Staffers Proud Joe Biden Remembers He’s Running For President For Third Day In A Row”, “Joe Biden Insists Thomas Edison Would Never Use Jam On His Waffles.” “Relief After Joe Biden Finally Discovered On Philadelphia Bus.”

Instead, over a pic of The Groper, they have this: “DNC Pours All Campaign Funding Into New York, California To Win Popular Vote By Even Greater Margin Than 2016”. You can smell the tears.

Clicking through to Politics brings us these in order (and I won’t cheat by including the Infographics headlines, which aren’t meant to be funny): “RNC Concludes With Massive Fireworks Display Inside Oval Office”, “Trump Appears At RNC With 6 Hostages He Plans To Free After Election”, “‘Friend, You Understand Friend? Gesture Democratic Leaders To Focus Group Of Working-Class Voters”, “Commentators Note Healthy Choice Commercial That Played Between RNC Broadcasts Made Powerful, Stirring Case For Reduced-Calorie Dinners”.

Ha.

The best anti-Trump headline was “‘Oh Jeez, Oh Jeez, Oh Jeez,’ Says Eric Trump After Accidentally Bringing Father’s Sexual Assault Victims To RNC”.

I don’t have any evidence of it, but all Onion editorial meetings must now start with everybody announcing their pronouns. Each time, in case anybody’s has changed since yesterday. They likely have a Chief Woke Officer whose job is to shout “That’s not funny!” to the punchline of all jokes about feminists.

College students are offered internships, not to write anything, but to follow staffers around and laugh. Somebody has to.

It can’t be too long now before we see a headline like this: “Only Racists Don’t Laugh At Us.”

Well, there is no reason to seek for the why of their fall. It’s the same everywhere. The woke are dead.

Meanwhile, we all know who has superseded The Onion. The folks who wrote “Riotous BLM Protesters Suddenly Realize They’re All White People”, “‘We Black Women Are Ignored,’ Says Multimillionaire Black Woman To Millions Of Adoring Fans” and “Leftists Fight Fascism By Marching Through Streets Forcing Everyone To Perform Their Special Salute”.

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Categories: Fun

14 replies »

  1. Thanks Matt. Just what was needed with my morning dos of caffeine.

    Got me thinking about the larger arc of activity agains the “bad orange man”. Before Nov 15 they spent all their creative juices to throw all kinds of stuff at BOM. It did not work. After that election they initially re-litigated some of that stuff — NO GO.

    Then they tried to invent stuff from his contemporaneous actions — BIG FAIL.
    Now with the re-treaded military insult stuff is going to run into the buzz-saw of his record.

    It would be interesting to see how many refurbished issues show up, indicating they have run out of creative juices.

  2. Deebee: Most democrat pronouncements are recycled. Democrats lack creativity and tend to just doubledown and repeat themselves in the hope that people will eventually BELIEVE like they are supposed to. It’s a tactic they have used for probably close to a century, maybe more. They repeat the same thing every election and people fall for it. I’m not sure I blame the Democrats or the large number of stupid, apathetic people out there. It obviously worked for a very long time and may work again.

  3. Cliche of the day: Remember when Saturday Night Live used to be funny? Remember when TV comedy was comedy done for the sake of comedy and not progressive ideology?

  4. “Remember when TV comedy was comedy done for the sake of comedy and not progressive ideology?”
    Ah, yes. The Carol Burnett Show was divine. But I believe it was the last example of that ideal.

  5. Consider the late night talk show hosts. When was the last one who was considered conservative?

    One has to be an extreme lib to get that type of gig because politics.

    O, and without checking google, try and guess the last year there was a Republican Mayor of Chicago.

    ABS looked it up a few days ago…

  6. “last year there was a Republican Mayor of Chicago.”

    Thompson mid 30’s.

    The Daley dynasty with father and son reigning for 42 years didn’t help.
    I miss Mike Royko.

  7. The Onion peaked around 2008-2012 when they had their top-notch videos. Take for example “Voting Machines Elect One of their Own”. There’s the obvious joke: a voting machine rigs the election not for a candidate but for a voting machine. But the video goes beyond the obvious joke and does thing like making fun of political pundits (who interpret the fact that the voting machine only got any votes in urban centers that use voting machines rather than paper voting as meaning that urban voters are more comfortable with the idea of being ruled over by machines) and the general public (who are upset that a voting machine won despite no one voting for it, but that’s how democracy works). And the news ticker is filled with jokes on top of that.

    They started falling after 2012 when they started making lazier and lazier jokes, though they still had a bit of a funny bone left. Then they became an organ of the Hillary campaign and started making jokes like “isn’t funny that rural voters are too stupid to realize that Hillary is the most qualified candidate to ever run?” Four years past that, we get this. It’s just a twitching corpse at this point.

  8. I was just watching some old clips of ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ last night, and oh boy, they couldn’t get away with some of that stuff now…

  9. Wow, what happened to the Onion? Admittedly I haven’t visited the site in years (too NSFW), but, wow.

    There’s a not-so-fine line between satire and anger, and they are all over the wrong side of it.

    Good liberal satire will make me cringe, but this is just . . . oh, what’s the word . . . sad.

  10. I remember the classic Onion story “Gay-Pride Parade sets mainstream acceptance of gays back 50 years.”

    “I’d always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth,” said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. “Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong.”

    The BLM riots are so obviously an example of the same kind of thing that I kept waiting for the Onion to give them the same treatment — but they never did.

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