The Onion

I like the Onion a lot, because its brand of satire is carefully constructed, and nobody finds sanctuary from it’s critiquing.  There’s no safety from The Onion— liberals, conservatives, young, old, any race… it doesn’t matter, The Onion is more than willing to point out the flaws with the system.  The Onion is rather interesting, however, because the way it posts it’s stories is sometimes so realistic that people take it seriously!  Sometimes their headlines are so silly it’s difficult to imagine that anyone would believe them, for instance, their recent headline “Man Approaches Unfamiliar Shower Knobs Like He’s Breaking a Wild Stallion” or “Man Takes Sober Moment to Reflect on Fact That Most of Meal Already Gone”, but some of their articles are given quite normal titles (“Arguments for and Against Bernie Sanders Staying in the Race”).  An avid reader of The Onion myself, even I find myself caught unawares sometimes while reading an article, like “This is so unbelievable!”  Well, it is unbelievable… it’s The Onion.  But I think The Onion is a fascinating example of comedy and satire, because it tackles some very important issues in (primarily American) society, and I think is a prime example of polysemic bimodality. 

Three of these examples are The Onion, one is another known satire site.  I just very much enjoy these articles, because as we can see, the people that are posting links to these articles are very much of the belief that the articles are writing facts.  This is an example of a piece of media that can be read in several different ways— either reinforcing current beliefs, or as a piece undermining currently held stereotypes of beliefs.

One of my favorite articles, released in 2009 as I remember, was entitled “Nation’s Blacks Creeped Out By All The People Smiling At Them” is a discussion about “new racism”, basically, pointing out that just because President Obama took office, racism isn’t over.  However, the responses it got were hysterically funny.

“I can’t believe that people are getting annoyed by smiling!”

“Why do they want us to return to being indifferent?  Don’t they want to be our brethren?” 

etc. etc. 

There was no point in trying to point out to any of the individuals that wrote the above comments that The Onion writes satire, because it looked so professional to them that they were willing to fight about it being actual media.

This, I believe, shows the danger of writing satire, or using humor to make your point.  I very much enjoy The Onion, don’t get me wrong, I believe that their use of satire is highly entertaining, and it makes me think differently about some of the major issues of American society.  But I also have to acknowledge that some people just don’t understand satire, and so the point of the article backfires.

This important question is, then, whether or not sites like The Onion do more harm than good with their articles.  On the whole, because they advertise themselves so plainly as satire, and are swell known for their writings, I’m inclined to believe they’re doing more good than harm with their work, especially because they write about some crucially important ideas.