I think the Onion is as good as it ever was. The issue now is that the real news is so wild and unhinged the Onion doesn't have that segment cornered anymore.
The Onion youtube vids of the late 2000's were phenomenal. It was all downhill from there imo. Take a look at this recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niC4ACCp20. I don't like Taylor Swift but this is just not funny. I don't see what the point of it is is.
The new one is really bad. Feels so fake. And the anchor can't role play. The old one is so much better. If you don't listen, you don't even get that it is a joke.
That is true, but the Onion is also a shell of its former self. The Onion became a household name because of how widely consumed it used to be. It doesn't have anywhere near that reach or cultural influence today.
I think the problem is that American politics has become so polarized, that humor anywhere is more likely to be partisan political and written directly in reaction to that week’s events. The development has been observed for late-night television, and it’s not a new thing with The Onion either: already over a decade ago, friends who had grown up on classic 1990s Onion were bemoaning this shift. Sure, The Onion had used political figures in jokes before (“Congress Debates Rush”, “Clinton Declares Self President For Life”) but those politicians could have stood for anything; there was very little reference to specific policies or controversies.
Oh come on now. The world wasn't just sent to live with it's auntie and uncle in Bel-Air. The distressed sullen worldview might be new to you, but people certainly had it back when I found the Onion regularly quite enjoyable too.
In 2004, George W Bush was re-elected. At that time, a plausible Onion story might have been that George W Bush was going to appoint a vaccine denier HHS and someone who was investigated by the DOJ as AG, and that would have been, like, mildly funny (which was always the Onion's thing, really; it was almost never _great_), because haha, the president popularly considered to be a bit incompetent is appointing obviously unsuitable people, how amusing, but also, well, a bit of fun, not real. (Actually, if anything I think this might have strayed a bit too far into absurdity for the Onion's liking, particularly Gaetz.)
Fast-forward to 2024, and, well... It just doesn't work as well anymore. Like, imagine an Onion story about Trump's appointments. What could it possibly say that would be stranger than the reality?
Maybe appointing Paula Deen as the secretary of health. Show a "food pyramid" that is just multiple pies stacked on top of each other with a side of melted butter to wash it down with, and her vice secretary is a disgraced police officer with over 800 sanctions kitted out in full milspec riot gear whose job it is to beat every child who fails to eat 15 pies a day into submission?
I don't think it's changed that much. There's so much more comedy and parody content out there these days that our collective standards have changed. The onion's heyday was when the internet was a lot smaller.
I did see two objectionable articles. One about a 'car for woman that crashes' and one about the TGBL+ members of the Biden administration. This out of 10 or 20
Browsing their site I found an article that is making light of the suppression of women voters by using sexist tropes.
> Hundreds of thousands of women across America were left standing utterly clueless as to what to do at a voting booth after their husbands failed to tell them who to vote for.
> Voting at several polling stations ground to a halt after all of the booths became occupied by bewildered women. "This is a disaster," said poll worker John Bingham. "We've had thirty women taking up every booth for the past three hours, just staring like deer in headlights. We offered to bring them lunch while they made their choice, but they couldn't decide on a restaurant."
> At publishing time, voting stations had been forced to designate one voting booth for men only to allow voting to continue.
Given the history of women's right to vote, current laws causing women to needlessly die, and that many women today are undoubtedly being coerced by spouses to vote a certain way, calling this simply tone deaf would be extremely charitable. It is only truly funny if you have "women, am I right" as one of your shibboleths. Without that, it is clear misogyny.
All this to say I don't think a site promoting sexist views is a good alternative for a site that has made a master-class punchline out of trying to take a terrorist bigot off the air.
JD Vance has proposed that people with children should get more voting power. That sort of pressure would disenfranchise women who elect to not have children, or unduly pressure women to have children.
Vance’s backer, Peter Thiel, has also previously implied that women being able to vote has weakened democracy.
The Babylon Bee has gotten better, but it's still pretty amateurish compared to the best of The Onion. It's nice to have a satirical publication that leans the other way for balance.
Honest question: how so? The Onion has always billed itself as a "news" source, and parodied both form and content of traditional newspapers and TV news. The Babylon Bee seems to just put out jokes, without much of a unifying thematic framework.
The Babylon Bee occasionally takes a good swipe at liberals and democrats.
The Onion will go down in history as one of the most influential satire projects of all time, and is filled with genuinely talented writers and comedians. Even their early Youtube work was prescient and brilliant.
i disagree, they try to be a more right-wing version of the onion but they lack the surrealism of the onion.
comparing both instagram pages, BB posts mostly political content and they're all critical of democrats/liberals. the onion's page has much more variety
One option for the onion is to end being an entertaining opinion journal with very nuanced and layered (intended) points of view. They already are almost there, what place do they have where so many in the media are parodies of themselves ?
You think the world has gotten dumber? By the numbers it’s smarter even if it’s unevenly distributed and less smart than people’s vain sense of cultural identity leads them to believe.
For example; ~15% in the US have earned more than a bachelor’s. While public polls show people believe close to 50% have a PhD. Close to 50% have a bachelors.
So the majority misunderstand ground truth but understand how to abstractly find the answer.
Seems better to have people know how to count their way out of a bag and miss some inane specific than everyone being actually uneducated.
It's like the conundrum that the writers of South Park had, reality became worse than the worst they could think of. To the point where they really struggled when Trump actually won in 2016.
I actually have a copy that I stumbled across recently at a book store near me. I'm sure it won't be like the old days, but it was really cool to pick a hard copy up while out and about in town.
You can buy hard copies again if you subscribe. They used to give it away free in the 1990s because the world wasn't as hyper-capitalistic and it was practical to publish a free paper and put metal boxes on the street to distribute it while making a modest profit with advertising.
