Bad Satire at The Onion

The Onion's "Our Dumb World" is an online map of the world on which users can scroll around and read satirical factoids located at various points on the map. When a country is "featured" for the week (or month, or whatever) the blurbs proliferate within its borders. The problem with "Our Dumb World" is similar to the problems with The Simpsons' "Africa" episode or Hostel's handling of its Slovakian setting: it tries to pass off the writers' ignorance of the subject matter as a satirical critique of America's ignorance of the rest of the world. This week's featured country is Romania, and the various jokes include a spooky castle, a spooky path, a picture of Nicolae Ceauşescu dressed as Count Chocula on a box of cereal, a used coffin dealership (bored with the vampire schtick yet?), a gymnast in a Bride of Frankenstein fright wig, and some 11 other jokes about mad scientists, werewolves, vampire bats and reanimated corpses. What is conspicuously absent is evidence of any research whatsoever concerning Romania past or present, despite an abundance of such information on websites an 8-year-old could use. The Ceauşescus, for example, were killed in their dotage by assault rifles on Christmas Day. Or a one-step Google search for "Romanian jokes" yields this communist-era gem:

Q: What's big, black, noisy, makes a lot of smoke and cuts carrots in five?
A: The Romanian machine for cutting carrots in four.

Good satire is supposed to critique ignorance and injustice, not celebrate them. The worst of it is, The Onion's writers (like too many other North Americans) aren't even "dumb"-- they're just too lazy and complacent to care.

(Image from www.swingingpuss.com.)

The Onion: Humor in Shackles

This week The Onion is experimenting with an 18th century period theme. This is quite tedious to begin with, but the hateful and spectacularly unfunny "Humor in Shackles," which features mock jokes about the torture and killing of black slaves, is in the worst possible taste. Mark Twain's classic anti-slavery novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the word "nigger" over 200 times, yet still manages to depict its black and white characters as deeply human. "Humor in Shackles," despite its PC language, merely exploits horrific imagery in order to turn the knee-jerk mechanism of dehumanization back onto the white slave owners, committing itself to the same mentality of tribalist hatred and oppression that permits atrocities like slavery in the first place. Shitty satire* merely perpetuates the kind of thinking it purports to criticize, and this week's issue of The Onion is a case in point. Boo-urns.

*Also see Stuff White People Like, Wonder Showzen, etc.

(Image from bbb.videokitchen.tv.)