satire fails

Having grown up watching stand-up throughout the 1980s, I hew to the rather controversial view that there are no bad jokes, only unfunny ones. This is a line I think a lot of stand-ups want to take but it's harder and harder to maintain and stay working in the era of instant internet outrage. See the public flaying of Gilbert Gottfried over his Japanese tsunami tweets. You tell a funny joke, people laugh, you keep telling it. Tell an unfunny joke, people don't laugh, and you rip it out of the act. Those non-stop hilarious, award-winning HBO specials aren't written in a week, folks. They're the result of months and months, if not years, on the road, night after night testing and refining jokes in comedy clubs all over the United States.

I extend the same theory to comedy in general. The Onion's Oscar Night tweet wasn't a "bad" joke. It wasn't funny. Period. Attacking the site, especially after they offered an apology, misses the entire point of comedy. Calling 9 year old Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis the c-word wasn't funny. We've registered that fact, the Onion owned up to it, let's move on.

In case you've had your head buried in the sand like I usually do, here's the gist of it. On Sunday night, the Onion published this tweet:

People lost their minds because the website called a little girl the c-word. The tweet was deleted within a few hours (but thankfully preserved via the internet). On Monday, Steve Hannah, the CEO of The Onion, issued the following apology.

Dear Readers,

On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting.

No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire.

The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.

In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

Sincerely,

Steve Hannah
CEO
The Onion

The mantra that keeps getting repeated is that this is a rare apology from The Onion. No one seems to be citing other controversies in which The Onion refused to back down. The closest I could find is this index of stories over at the Huffington Post. Along with Onion staffers past and present, I guess I'm firmly in the camp against the apology. Even some members over at the staff at Forbes are against it.

I mostly agree with Movie Bob over at The Escapist. His analysis of the work it takes to craft a funny joke and the laziness of the instant age through so-called live snarking are spot on. I also think he does a pretty good job trying to break down what the joke was trying to do; i.e. to satirize the constant roll of comments about Hollywood, much of it nasty, and much of the nastiest of the nasty aimed at women.

I'm going to leave aside free speech and disciplining employees for work clearly within the parameters of the company's work. Instead, I want to look at the joke a little closer. Where I think Bob goes off-track is in concluding that "that joke wasn't worth telling in the first place." He overlooks a couple of key points.

First, those familiar with the Onion would immediately recognize the tweet for what it was: a joke. It was never intended to be an attack on Quvenzhané Wallis. In fact, they targeted her exactly because she wasn't supposed to be the target of an attack. She's a child and bloggers usually lay off the vitrol when it comes to children. Tweeting about her focused the satirical edge. It had to be her because saying something nasty about any other (adult) actress would simply look like all the other nastiness.

Second, part of the problem is that of audience. When you pay your money and take a seat at a comedy club, you (are supposed to) know what you're signing up for. There's a selection bias at work. Unfortunately for the Onion, twitter doesn't work with that same selection bias. Anybody reading the Oscar tweets would have been able to pick up their comment, even those unfamiliar with or not amused by the Onion. Satire, especially the hard edged kind the Onion is known for, isn't everybody's cup of tea. The internet and especially twitter spread offense at the speed of retweet.

Third, the context is pretty clear when you read the whole tweet. Summaries like "the Onion basically called Wallis the c-word" miss the context clues that should let you know this is satire. The "[e]veryone else seems afraid to say it" and the form of a question ending with "right?" indicate this isn't meant to be taken seriously. It isn't a declaration, it's a question in the familiar "amirite" form. And the fact that "everyone is afraid to say it" brackets off the conclusion. They don't say it not because they afraid to say it but because it's a wrong thing to say. The point was to transgress those boundaries to comment about the daily transgression of those boundaries by Perez Hilton, TMZ, and others. The tweet as a whole disavows the very conclusion that people made and shared about it.

All of this to say that I didn't think the joke was all that funny. I get what the writer over at the Onion was trying to do. Maybe 140 characters isn't enough to properly establish satire in. Maybe I would have found it funnier if I had been following their entire series of tweets about the Oscars so that I was prepared for a joke-mean on its surface-about a 9 year old. Or maybe I just don't think 9 year olds should be the target of such jokes even when they're not really the targets. Maybe we should leave the kids out of the politics. Even those kids who walk down the target range that has become the Red Carpet.

The difference between my view and Bob's is perhaps subtle but important. He thinks the joke wasn't worth telling. I think it was worth telling, it just wasn't funny. And maybe there's a place in this world, a critical place, for unfunny jokes. [roll out tired bit for cheap laughs] Except for Dane Cook. That guy sucks.

the panel heard 'round the world

Superman: a world citizen

I know I keep promising to talk about the female form in comics and Wonder Woman, but timeliness...

This week Fox News opened a new ridiculous front in the evolving (pop) culture wars (see: Mass Effect is interspecies gay porn, Bulletstorm encourages rape). In its record-breaking 900th issue, Superman announces his intention to renounce his US citizenship before the UN, stating:

Superman's comment is sparked by his visit to Iran to protect anti-government protestors and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, notably not a fictional proxy, accusing him of intervening to promote American interests.

The Escapist covers the story and notes that Fox News is mostly even-handed in its reporting. User comments, on the other hand, contain enough venom to kill the world's population 100x times over.

Fox's "friends" can't seem to differentiate between Superman not wanting his actions, which still fully promote American values of individualism, freedom, and democracy, from being constructed as projections of the White House and Superman being anti-American. Such an all-or-nothing, you're-either-with-us-or-you're-a-terrorist is the same un-nuanced, black & white, jingoist nonsense we spent 8 years suffering through with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld running the show. It comes as no surprise to me that regular viewers and browsers of the Fox News worldview would react so violently negative to Superman's announcement.

Rather than being anti-American, Superman seems to be acknowledging the weakness with being associated with a particular nation that spent 8 long years dividing the world into allies and enemies with its foreign policy pursuits. He's setting aside his national citizenship not because he's turned his back on America or his Smallville values but because the most effective way for him to promote those very values for the entire planet is not to be seen as a tool of a crusadin' cowboy president of a single nation. Superman protects the globe from bad guys and as such serves humanity. He is a symbol of the goodness of humanity, not just 300 million instances of it.

But the right-wing nut jobs are out in full force, crying a conspiracy of the liberal media to attack and destroy this nation by undermining its whatever. I'm not sure what they think is being undermined here other than chauvinism masquerading as "patriotism." Because there's only 1 way to be "American" and anybody who doesn't follow the party line espoused by Rupert Murdoch's collection of talking heads, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich just isn't a "real American."

For instance,

The liberal, America hating scumbags who now run DC Comics are just adding another feather in their cap with yet more anti-American culture and tradition jihad. Fuck 'em.

And

This is why I don't go to movies or even rent anymore. I'm not making the left loons of Hollywood any richer to support their campaign of American hate.

Us & them, friends & enemies, white hats & black hats. It's sad that American political discourse is currently governed by the same mentality that dominates elementary school playgrounds.

Notice that Clark Kent isn't renouncing his US citizenship or defecting to a hostile foreign power. Because Fox's "friends" certainly didn't. The man beneath the red, blue, and yellow cape and tights still firmly believes in the American experiment. It's just when he has to serve as the shining beacon of that experiment, he doesn't want his message to be swallowed by global attitudes towards recent American foreign adventures. Jim Lee and Dan Didio, co-publishers of DC Comics, have been trying to make this point.

Oh yeah, and by the way guys, Superman is a fictional character...