Adventures in tastelessness at The Onion

January 29, 2015 3:31 PM

Another joke of Carol’s was to say, on a crowded subway, “Did you hear about Maria’s new boyfriend?” I enjoyed this, so I’d always go, “What? Maria’s dating someone?” I’d be pleasantly surprised. “How long’s this been going on?” Carol would act like someone who has a secret she shouldn’t tell. I’d pressure her to spill. After some back and forth, she’d say, “He fucks her with a gun.”
posted by josher71 (44 comments total)

So, who knows the mysterious Katrina headline?
posted by Zonker at 3:40 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love The Onion, and I especially appreciate the way they've dealt with events like 9/11 with just the right comic tone that manages to skirt outright tastelessness without feeling safe. I wouldn't have guessed though that it was the ad department that was the secret ingredient to their formula.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:44 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Lucky thing for us that The Onion's editors and writers are not based in France, else they'd have been arrested long ago, probably.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 3:47 PM on January 29, 2015

This article reads like a eulogy for Carol. Was she the first one against the wall when the revolution came? What happened? You can't write this sort of starry-eyed reminiscing without some kind of explanation that Carol is OK and that "gone off to Hollywood" is not a euphemism.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 3:47 PM on January 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

Just a note: the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs are not at all respectful towards trans people. Among other things, being trans is not the same as cross-dressing. The server was living full-time as a woman, making her a trans woman, not a cross-dressing man.
posted by Banknote of the year at 3:48 PM on January 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

Well if it wasn't a eulogy for Carol before, the commenters on the piece might be angry enough to make it so.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:49 PM on January 29, 2015

The Weird Al "Tears in Heaven" joke is pretty fucking funny.
posted by Nevin at 3:49 PM on January 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

being trans is not the same as cross-dressing

Even the "newer kind"?
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:49 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hey, Carol's not dead!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 3:52 PM on January 29, 2015

Just a note: the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs are not at all respectful towards trans people.

The article is so vague it's hard to even make this argument. You don't know the server's gender any more than the author does; the server never says anything.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:52 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Just a note: the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs are not at all respectful towards trans people.

The article is so vague it's hard to even make this argument.

Calling someone a cross-dresser without a really good reason isn't particularly respectful.
posted by Etrigan at 3:54 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I like the Onion but apparently none of them grew up on the 1970's National Lampoon, which was horribly tasteless and funny.
posted by ITravelMontana at 3:54 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Even the "newer kind"?

I know you're probably just joking around, but that phrase in the article sent my levels of GRAR and outrage through the roof. I know trans women whose transitions were decades ago — some of them pass better than others — and for the author to imply that there's anything "newer" about transitioning openly really, really bothers me.
posted by Banknote of the year at 3:55 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) used to do a swimming pool prank to amuse himself in his pre-fame days. He'd pour a load of instant coffee granules down the back of his trunks, swim a quick length, then pull himself laboriously out of the pool at the deep end with lumpy brown water streaming from his butt. Cleared the pool in seconds, by all accounts.

It was also Humphries who'd sneak his airline sick bag into the on-board toilet, fill it with a tub of vegetable soup he'd brought on board and then return quietly to his seat. At the first sign of turbulence, he'd pretend to be sick in the bag, making the loudest retching noise he could to attract everyone's attention, then sit back calmly and eat the vegetable soup with a spoon while his horrified fellow passengers looked on aghast.

Viv Stanshall and Keith Moon used to team up for stunts on the Tube too, but I'm damned if I can think of just what it was they used to do now.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:55 PM on January 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

It's one thing to make a funny, satirical news publication for mass consumption. It's another, far funnier thing entirely to make a funny, satirical news publication for a select audience of the people you work with.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:57 PM on January 29, 2015

Banknote: I definitely meant that sarcastically. "Newer kind" -- ugh. Gross.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 3:57 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Dame Edna's pranks don't involve a possum?

I am disappoint
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 3:57 PM on January 29, 2015

The "newer kind," "polite thing is to use the female pronoun" (right after using a male pronoun!) make it very much sound like the server was a transgender woman and the author is an ignorant asshole. Nothing about those paragraphs read as "comfortable with the situation" as she claims to have been. In fact it parses as pretty fucking transphobic.
posted by byanyothername at 3:59 PM on January 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

Tasteless comedy and what does or doesn't cross the line is a fantastically tangled and thorny subject. I'm personally comfortable with drawing the line at whether the humor punches up or down. The comedy portrayed in this piece punches down so much more than up (if you count joking about Weird Al's parents dying as punching up) that I'd be pretty content if I never crossed paths with either Carol Kolb or Amie Barrodale, like, ever. What a weirdly self-congratulatory piece given what the author's congratulating themselves for.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 4:04 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it really comes off as "Carol is great! She's totally insensitive and transphobic, and she likes to troll people in public, and she LOVES pissing off people at work!"
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:06 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm going to go with the concept that Carol Kolb (who I see writes for both Nick Kroll and Community) is probably a really funny person, and that it's Amie Barrodale who is shockingly poor at conveying how or why somebody is funny.

What I've gleaned here is that one of these people continues to work in comedy, and the other writes vaguely literary drivel for the Paris Review.
posted by Strange Interlude at 4:14 PM on January 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

Maybe, The World Famous, That Is The Point.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:14 PM on January 29, 2015

I said it was, and she said, “Well, was the safety on?”

Down south, this is what we call "safe sex."
posted by octobersurprise at 4:15 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Viv Stanshall and Keith Moon used to team up for stunts on the Tube too, but I'm damned if I can think of just what it was they used to do now.

I read that story too. Viv dressed up as a vicar and pretended to read the Bible, while Keith picked his pocket in full view of all the other passengers.
posted by verstegan at 4:16 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

The Weird Al "Tears in Heaven" joke is pretty fucking funny.

They did actually run the article after his parents died. From carbon monoxide poisoning. With abysmal lyrics given.
posted by ambrosen at 4:18 PM on January 29, 2015

With praise like this, who needs a hatchet job?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:19 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

I feel like that piece has a missing second page somewhere.

Carol said, outraged, “How did you get that?”

And then what happened?
posted by mythical anthropomorphic amphibian at 4:20 PM on January 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yeah, in addition to the transphobic stuff the article has a case of "actually-not-longform-itis." Settle in for a long read only to find out the ending is just the last autosave before the author's laptop died or something.
posted by papayaninja at 4:26 PM on January 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

They did actually run the article after his parents died. From carbon monoxide poisoning. With abysmal lyrics given.

Hunh. Like so many things, that was far funnier in theory than in practice.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 4:28 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I remember liking the This American Life segment about what it takes to write headlines at the Onion, from back when they were still in New York.

Though for my taste, the best stuff lately has been at Clickhole, now that the video is intermittent.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 4:29 PM on January 29, 2015

This article is transphobic.
posted by pickles_have_souls at 4:31 PM on January 29, 2015

Another joke of Carol’s was to say...

I'm honestly confused. What was the first joke? Was there a first joke? I don't think there was a first joke. Is that the joke?
posted by wam at 4:32 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

And then what happened?

The Media Corporation Presidential Defenestration of 2005.
posted by The Zeroth Law at 4:36 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Like so many things, that was far funnier in theory than in practice.

The headline would have been hilarious. The story added zip.
posted by Etrigan at 4:36 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

They did actually run the article after his parents died.

How tasteless. Honoring a dead parent's memory with Clapton.
posted by octobersurprise at 4:36 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I honestly figured the whole "crossdresser" thing was because it's describing a moment in 2005, when plenty of people would totally have used that word, even if they sorta knew better as sophisticated city dwellers. We've come a long way in 10 years, even though there's far to go.
posted by JauntyFedora at 4:37 PM on January 29, 2015

I like irreverence and bad taste as long as it's really funny. This article was weird and short and unclear, or, basically, what everybody else has said.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 4:38 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Even leaving aside the author's transphobia, what kind of disgusting asshole do you have to be to try and elicit your readers' sympathy by relating an anecdote where you viciously insult the appearance of a total stranger in public for absolutely no reason? Double unpleasantness if that person's job is to serve you.

Not even doing the unpleasantness math with the rest of the article factored in.
posted by byanyothername at 4:40 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I wish I were funny enough, and in the right place enough, to have written for The Onion. When I was in to it, I couldn't believe how consistently funny it was (though I often thought that their religious stuff didn't quite hit the mark. They should have tried to get Stephen Colbert on staff for a bit to give them some signposts. But anyway).

I would like to read more stuff about the behind-the-scenes at America's Finest News Source. And I agree that this was just "whoa where did the rest of this article go" short; I'm not sure an editor had ever seen it.
posted by Poppa Bear at 4:41 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I like how people dig up these objections and start anachronistically assigning psycho-political disorders to everything, as if they're actually making an astute observation.

Even leaving aside the author's transphobia, what kind of disgusting asshole do you have to be to try and elicit your readers' sympathy by relating an anecdote where you viciously insult the appearance of a total stranger in public for absolutely no reason? Double unpleasantness if that person's job is to serve you.

Ok, so you don't read The Onion.
posted by phaedon at 4:41 PM on January 29, 2015

Yeah, it felt like the article was weirdly unfunny and just stopped in mid-air. And add me to those who are unimpressed with Carol Kolb.

It would have been possible to write some good jokes about Katrina, just as it was possible to writes jokes about 9/11, which The Onion pulled off brilliantly. What you do is satirize the aspects of the situation that aren't about people suffering and dying. In their 9/11 issue, The Onion satirized things like the way the hijackers had perverted their own religion ("Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell", "God Angrily Clarifies Thou Shall Not Kill" rule) and the general populace's struggle to process and adequately respond to the event ("Woman Bakes American Flag Cake", "America Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again"). With Katrina, the satire could have been about government incompetence or the general U.S. populace's inadequate reaction.
posted by orange swan at 4:42 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Most of this reads like it's the transcript of one half of an interview where the tape recorder died out unexpectedly and no one noticed. That said, I love these kinds of stories. Even more when they don't have transphobic anecdotes with no point or punchline.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:42 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The onion did have a response to Katrina. It was a huge front page headline back when they still had newsstands full of paper copies everywhere.

It's funnier than this article.
posted by pugg at 4:49 PM on January 29, 2015

Ok, so you don't read The Onion.

I don't often, actually. The headlines are usually funnier than the articles actually written out. The videos are hit and miss, but there is some real comedy gold in the older ones. This and the ninja parade are probably my favorites. I don't follow the Onion very closely, no. Have they shifted toward being meanspirited, humorless assholes across the board, or is there something else you'd like to say?

I like how people dig up these objections and start anachronistically assigning psycho-political disorders to everything, as if they're actually making an astute observation.

I sincerely have no idea what this word salad means, though. It looks like you're suggesting that trans people are a "psycho-political disorder," or a recent development in the world or something, which doesn't make sense to acknowledge existing in 2005, even if we're reading it in 2015 or...?
posted by byanyothername at 4:55 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]