Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.

Love it or hate it, The Onion inserts itself into conversations

BIZ THEONION-BIZPLUS 1 TB
Mike McAvoy is president of The Onion, which started as a satirical newspaper but has expanded into a digital media company featuring its comedic sensibility.

It all began with Jonathan Swift and his not-so-modest proposal. The country is in a famine? Let’s eat the kids. Was he serious? Obviously not — but many people of his time thought he was, and that my friends, was OK.

See more: 'The Onion' makes me want to cry

Satire has never been intended to please the unintelligent; The Onion is no exception. As we scroll through our news feeds, we often see clever headlines such as: “‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says the Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” 

When you stopped to read that headline, The Onion had already done half of its job. You paused, you contemplated, and then … you may have clicked. In general, it is a company pursuing the original definition of satire: “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues,” according to Google's dictionary. 

Sure, there are people who cannot differentiate humor from reality, but that truly is a personal issue, and not one the educated world needs to worry about. The Onion is writing for two audiences, and you can choose which one you’d like to identify with. The first audience would be innocent-minded Internet users looking for a good laugh, and the other would be the educated, highly concerned population. The latter definitely needs a good laugh, because, truth-be-told, our world sucks.

Quite frankly, if The Onion wasn’t publicly correcting humanity’s stupidity, some unqualified blogger would be. Bloggers are already taking over sectors of the Internet, and there’s no means of knowing who is behind those screen names. Most of them spend their days ranting and raving, hardly ever with credentials, and almost never providing any journalistic benefit.

Sites such as The Onion however, draw attention to issues, even if it is all in fun. They take headlines produced by world-renowned news sources such as The New York Times, reword them and say exactly what the other source should have been saying all along. Like when The Onion said that there’s no way to stop these random murderous rampages, “it’s just the mentality of these people.” The Onion called the country on its bluff, because we should really be saying, “We are the only country with this problem, but our youth may be the most privileged, our 8-year-olds are playing Call of Duty and our young adults can buy a gun before they can go to a bar.” 

The publication itself emphasized the ridiculousness of the concept that we can’t stop these people, even as the most “economically advanced” country in the world.

This article in particular is a perfect example of why we need satire. Someone has to be honest, and Lord knows Americans don’t like bluntness. I mean, at least they have the courtesy to try to make the darkest of situations laughable. For the educated, it’s a source that says exactly what we are thinking. For the uneducated, well … maybe we really “can’t do anything about it.”


Reach the columnist at krpenningroth@gmail.com or follow @KPenningroth on Twitter.

Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.

Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.

Want to join the conversation? Send an email to opiniondesk.statepress@gmail.com. Keep letters under 300 words and be sure to include your university affiliation. Anonymity will not be granted.


Continue supporting student journalism and donate to The State Press today.

Subscribe to Pressing Matters



×

Notice

This website uses cookies to make your experience better and easier. By using this website you consent to our use of cookies. For more information, please see our Cookie Policy.