 |
Post-Modern Drunk: The Onion and the C Word
The Onion is one of the gold standards of comedy on the internet. I've been following them for most of my life; I had a paid subscription to the newspaper when I was back in college, which is weird, because the newspaper is free and also available on the internet, which is where I spent most of my time anyway.
So like most of you, I was really disappointed by the tweet mocking Quvenzhané Wallis during the Oscars last night. Mostly, I'm disappointed because it's a needlessly lazy and crass joke; it fails at actually funny because it leans too much on simple transgression for its comedy, and it fails at some of the basic rules of comedy: it punches down, rather than up. Some of the best comedy attacks the pompous and the powerful. Quvenzhané Wallis is a confident brash actress nominated for the most pretigious award in Hollywood, but she's still a nine year old girl.
When you peel back the layers of the joke, you can see what they were trying to do. It sticks to a tried and true formula: take an almost universally admired public figure, and make an outlandish accusation at them. It's funny because it's so self-evidently not true. Oprah Winfrey can only achieve sexual satisfaction by watching hobos get murdered. Nelson Mandela likes to promise large sums of gold coins to needy organizations only to replace it with Hanukkah gelt. Shit like that. It's lazy comedy, and it often only just takes on the appearance of being funny without actually achieving a laugh.
I have no specific insight into the circumstances that inspired The Onion writer to write this particular tweet, but I can very easily imagine that they were trying to parody a certain type of asshole on the Internet: One of the strengths of the Onion is that they take what assholes are saying online and then just ramp it up to the limits of Poe's Law, to say ironically and articulately what people are actually saying online and expose them to ridicule. The Onion's policy is to never tip their hat that they're speaking ironically--just to say it and count on people to figure it out by the absurdity of what they're saying. It leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
Likely, this particular tweet was to parody the particular weird animosity that surrounds people at Oscar time, perhaps best typified by the way people have really viciously turned on Anne Hathaway. Somehow it's become completely okay to say totally nasty things about Anne Hathaway; it only becomes self-evidently repugnant when it's said about a self-confident nine year old girl, but that doesn't mean it's right to go after Anne Hathaway.
I'm not really interested in going on a witchhunt and seeing scalps at The Onion or anything like that, and I'm really leary about the idea that we should police comedy more strictly, because that seems like a pretty good way to get watered down bullshit for comedy. We shouldn't leave transgressive comedy to Daniel Tosh or Dane Cook, because they'll ruin it. But that doesn't mean anyone gets off the hook when they make a stupid lazy joke. The bar should be higher for quality for the transgressive joke. If you're going to mention rape, or say "cunt" or "fag," you better make sure the joke isn't that you're saying rape or cunt or fag. Leave that weak shit at home, okay?
