There was a front page Onion story once that made Christopher Hitchens out to be a belligerent drunk who had to be “forcibly removed” from somewhere and I am certain that the real Hitchens publicly objected to this characterization - not that he made a big deal of it, but he didn’t see the humor in it & said so. Some perfunctory googling failed to dredge up the response I’m referring to, however.
That’s what I was going to say - most women are aware enough to know when their nipples and hoohas are on display.
I would think the bizarre, absurd, off-the-wall quality of Onion celebrity parody articles would not only be unlikely to cause offense, but also make ‘retaliating’ of little use. Is Keira Knightley going to release a statement to the press denying becoming obsessed with an autograph seeker? Is Jon Hamm going to clarify that no, he didn’t tell some fan who constantly mentions him to her coworkers to shut up, as she was ruining him for everyone, it was just an Onion article?
Now, if we were talking about athletes, I’m surprised there haven’t been more comments from those parodied. Some of the Onion sports stuff is pretty cutting (and much funnier than the actor/singer/performer stuff).
From the article: “I saw the one of me washing a Trans-Am automobile in the driveway shirtless with tattoos all over myself and out there,” Biden said with a smile. He took some issue with the story, though. “By the way, I have a Corvette-- a '67 Corvette-- not a Trans-Am.”
I think a follow up correction article should be published. “We at the Onion take our journalistic pride very seriously, and strive to bring only the most current and accurate articles. It has come to our attention that the photo we used in our Biden piece had a Trans-AM photoshopped into it, rather than a '67 Corvette as was in the original photo. The Onion regrets the error.”
Fun Fact!
The actor playing ‘Ramsey Chamie’ in that (and the first phone in voice over) is one of my best friends in the world, Greg. He’s done a couple of those now.
Fun fact indeed. A glance back at some of the older threads on Onion topics and examples would reveal a serious discussion of the real identities (and credentials) of some of the video clip mainstays. Perhaps the most intriguing one to me is Clifford Banes and The Onion - Wikipedia has others to rival him.
The Onion’s TV show has left me rather cool, though. Too much, too fast, too cursory for my tastes. Works better in print and on YouTube.
Well, sports figures would probably be the best choice for the O.P.'s question. Maybe they’d be more likely to “not get” satire, and not accept it as part of fame, and want to make a statement. But I can’t Google “sports figure” and “Onion”, or I’ll just get the Onion article.
I think they’re worried that not enough people will know it isn’t real if it’s on the TV, so they push the absurdity further–which is too bad, because the best thing about the Onion video stuff is that it’s so similar to the real thing. And that’s what makes it good satire–not just more cheap parody like SNL.
True, but they still have to endure it still existing after they realize they made mistakes. I’m glad my teenage misadventures are not archived on film, that’s for sure.
Not that I really feel sorry for them–that’s the price of fame. Choose to go away and fade into obscurity, and no one will remember.
I heard a story on NPR, where a film critic defended the Fast and Furios movies as being progressive. The host of the show, Michelle Norris, played a clip of the Onion doing an interview of the writer of the latest movie, Fast Five, that was just a 3-year old saying “I want the cars to go fast and some of them to explode.”. It was very funny. (In my mind, I remembered her playing that clip for the actual writer of the movie which would have been more appropriate for this thread. However, when I went back to review the transcript, I found it was just a critic. Still, a good tribute to the Onion, having its clips played on NPR)
And that critic was full of it, because he was asserting that race in the movie was somehow dealt with in some new way that hasn’t been seen before, which is nonsense. He probably just likes to see cars go fast and explode–like the 3-year old. He had to back-pedal and say that the childishness of the film was necessary so that the audience wouldn’t notice that it was so racially progressive! :dubious: