I mean, a kid who trusts her caregivers will generally believe them about things at that age, won’t she?
“I know we said that’s a terrible word once, but this time they’re actually saying you’re really cool and beautiful. It’s a joke. They’re saying the opposite of what they really mean, just like you might tell the race winner they ran too slow.”
I don’t know. Figure out the wording but this doesn’t seem that implausible as a nine-year-old level explanation of the joke.
Heh, speaking of which, I remember once trying to explain to a friend what sarcasm was after one of my sarcastic jokes was taken seriously. Not sure how old I was at the time, but I was in elementary school, so if I was older than Quevanzhane, it wasn’t by much. I knew what sarcasm was, understood it, and employed it freely, but hell if I could explain it. I don’t think it’s unrealistic that a smart kid (which she appears to be) would get the joke. I get the angle of avoiding the joke because risking hurting her feelings isn’t right (which I don’t agree with, obviously, but still understand entirely), but Frylock’s right that it’s entirely possible that she would get it.
“Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Um…line!”
I thought it was funny because of the circumstances it was told in. Saget’s daughter had just been born in a very scary and traumatic birth that had endangered both his daughter and his wife, he was completely gut-wrenched, exhausted and drained, holding his vulnerable little daughter for the first time…and he dealt with it by making the most obscene joke imaginable. When I was in the exact same situation making any sort of joke was the furthest thing from my mind, but I’m no Saget.
I thought it was funny, too, even as I was shocked. By “shocked,” I didn’t mean offended … more like amazed, stunned and kind of impressed. It has become my personal threshold for how shocking a joke is.
No worries, I understood what you meant. Stunned and impressed was my reaction as well. 
I think your issue is appropriateness of venue, no? A comedian telling this joke in a nightclub would not be inappropriate, because it’s a venue where the joke is virtually guaranteed to never get back to the child in question. A comedian telling the same joke at the girl’s birthday party would be wildly inappropriate by any measure.
The problem is, we still haven’t worked out where the internet (and social media in particular) falls between those two extremes. Twitter is some bizarre combination of a performer talking to an audience, a guy shouting at a street corner, and writing someone a letter directly, and it’s tough to figure out what sort of social protocols properly apply. And, of course, those protocols get all weird when we’re talking about a celebrity.
Here’s the thing about assessing the potential harm of making a satirical tweet like that. If Wallis saw the Onion tweet at all, she was almost guaranteed to see a bunch of other stuff about her that was equally nasty, if not worse. I mean, I haven’t checked (and I don’t intend to) but I’m pretty sure there was more than one tweet made on Oscar night that called Wallis a nigger. They weren’t meant ironically, or satirically. And, absent the current controversy over the Onion’s tweet, they were just as visible to Wallis. It’s not fair to expect a nine year old to have a thick enough skin to shrug off stuff like that, but it is fair to expect the parent of a child celebrity to monitor their kids internet activity and make sure she’s either shielded from it entirely, or has enough emotional maturity and security to deal with it.
For the record, this is the joke:
Friend: Oh my God, Bob, she’s beautiful.
Saget: For a dollar, you can finger her.
Holy CRAP. That’s funny. Who THINKS of stuff like that? Damn.
Hmm, my three year old son hasn’t quite got the concepts of today vs. tomorrow down yet. Sarcasm is a little beyond him at this point, I think.
Anything that requires this much explanation is going to be opaque to a 9 year old girl, in my opinion.
It’s highly individual. My son is 20 and often misses sarcasm. My daughter was sardonic before she could talk, just with a look. One of her first sentences was, “*Nice *one, kitty,” when the cat missed a leap.
*No *idea where she gets that from. 
This is probably just as true if you take the word “celebrity” out of it.
The Onion’s Facebook page is slammed with joke comments about this whole thing. Every article they post has a couple dozen comments along these lines:
“(Article subject) are just some c****, aren’t they?”
“This is outrageous, I demand an apology.”
“When will we be seeing the apology for this one?”
“So it’s okay to joke about (subject) but not about a c***?”
As somebody who’s read The Onion in books or online for at least 12 years, I don’t remember them ever apologizing for anything, so I’m kind of disappointed that this is the one that they break for. They’ve certainly printed enough racist or sexist jokes before. The difference in other cases is that they usually put the “ironic” racism in quotes or in somebody else’s mouth - e.g., the last two articles about n***** were a guest column by the guy who hit that kid on the airplane, and “Apple Releases iPhone with N***** Engraved On Back.”
As for the quality of the jokes, it waxes and wanes, but that’s going to happen when anyone has to pump out so much content every day, just like a normal newspaper. And this whole thing is parallel to any real newspaper scandal: the Onion caved and apologized for a joke that was finally too offensive (to their core target demographic, of course, hipsters), thus losing some editorial credibility. Now who knows what other things they’ll self-censor before ever making it to print? Will they always be the leader in news satire? The NYT has had to apologize for Jayson Blair and (sort of apologized and retracted for) John Broder, and, that casts doubt on their integrity to bring only the truth to print as well, just like we expect the Onion to bring only the most biting satire to print.
This must be an outsider’s perspective. “Hipsters” are pretty evenly divided on South Park since they make their trade very blatantly in jokes meant to appeal to 16-30 y.o. bros. And The Onion’s core product - news satire - is too much of a niche market and I still regularly meet people who have never even heard of it. If it wasn’t for the music classifieds in the print editions they probably wouldn’t pull the circulation to continue existing.
Those protocols do get all weird when talking about a celebrity, and this Tweet is kind of satirizing us for forgetting that we should stick to core principles, which is, don’t say horrible shit about people just because they’re a celebrity. I do agree that Twitter is weird, and I’m not saying the tweeter in this case is an asshole; rather, I think the tweet was ill-advised, for the reasons I laid out.
I don’t so much agree with this, as follows.
First, The Onion isn’t just some random schmuck; they’re a significant player in the media biz, as evidenced by how often they become the news themselves.
Second, the Barbara Streisand effect, or its corollary, has kicked in here: the outrage over the tweet has made it far more visible than the initial tweet. I don’t think the tweeter (god I hate that word) intended this to happen, but I think it was predictable and should have been predicted.
Third, I don’t think the parents can guarantee she’ll be shielded from the tweet. She could find out about it because an older kid who’s her friend tells her, or an older friend who’s jealous of her success tells her, or her parents are raging about it after she goes to sleep and she overhears, or she does a vanity search at school (c’mon, she was at the Oscars, of course she’s gonna want to see what the buzz is around her!) and finds a news article, or any number of other ways that the parents can’t reasonably prevent.
SO the parents have the choice: try to shield her from it and hope they succeed, or recognize that they might not succeed and be the ones to try to explain a complex bit of satire to her.
Folks saying your kids understand sarcasm: that’s well and fine. This bit of satire is complex enough that plenty of adults aren’t understanding it. Even smart adults in this thread who get it viscerally are having trouble parsing the satire. I really don’t think it’s reasonable to let the default assumption be that a 9-year-old will be able to grasp the satire and not be upset by the underlying insult.
And I don’t think it’s going to break her, is going to ruin her life or anything. This isn’t worth making a federal case over; I think the best possible outcome of the original tweet would have been if it had been ignored. But if/when she finds out about it, it’ll probably give her a shitty day, and the joke’s not worth that.
Yes, that would be over the line. There is no comedian that has the right to personally harass me on the street. Running up to people and shouting names at them isn’t acceptable on any level in our society. It is, in this society, associated with wackos who may do you physical harm.
In this society, celebrity comes with perks and drawbacks that we all are familiar with and accept. The awards are money, fame, adoration, awards, travel, glamorous pictures and awesome things said about you on the internet.
The drawbacks are loss of privacy, lots of hard work and rejection and bad things said about you on the internet.
Most of us hardworking schmucks who don’t know how we will make our next rent would gladly go for that trade off, some of us wouldn’t. Q’s family has made the decision to go for it, and Q genuinely looks to be happy with that choice. There is no way she gets to ride that ride without the drawbacks though. Not gonna happen.
In the case of the Onion issue, it truly was a compliment wrapped in shocking satire, and that can be explained to the child. Children aren’t total idiots. She may not be able to deconstruct the joke to its bones, but she can be told why it isn’t truly calling her something bad and is, in fact, pointing out how sweet she is.
Like Miller said, though, there really WILL be horrible things said about her on the internet and she WILL find out. With smart phones and google and cousins and little friends who are online and on facebook and all that, it is pollyanna as hell to think she can be shielded from ever hearing bad things about herself. Someone better teach her to deal when that happens. At the same time, that same person can explain, "This wasn’t one of those times when someone really is saying something awful about you. This time, it was a grown up joke that used your name, and the writer did NOT think you were an awful word.
ETA: I thought it was Miller who pointed out the fact that she will find out about the cunt thing, but I was wrong. Ok, I’m saying it. It is crazy to think she won’t find out. She certainly will. And she will find out that other terrible things are said about her on the internet as well.
And you handled yourself beautifully in both of those threads.
Do hipsters still like Tarantino?
This incident shows that The Onion has shamefully abandoned its core principles. Thankfully we still have Cakewrecks.com to carry the torch of journalistic integrity and boldly opine on the issues of the day.
Has anyone jokingly called another poster a cunt yet in this thread?
Someone should do that. I’m sure it would be cool. It’s not like we’ve had a thing about that here.
Make it a 13 year old, though. Wouldn’t want to violate the terms of use.