Most people in this world (I’m looking at you, China) don’t understand that The Onion is satirical and when they see a tweet like that start making the rounds, they take it at face value. That’s not The Onion’s fault.
The joke’s hilarious and fits in with The Onion’s style and humor. I’m disappointed that they took it down, actually.
In 2005, Kathy Griffin got in trouble for joking that she just got out of rehab:
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/fzh5jm/kathy-griffins-dakota-fanning-joke
How soon we forget…
I saw it as satirizing the shark-like coverage of red-carpet blogosphere-- catty, over-the-top, shallow. Perez, E!, Joan Rivers…which hack can get the most attention by verbally attacking a movie star!
I mean is there a worse thing that can be said about a 9-year-old girl? Of course not. That’s what makes this so funny. Would have been even funnier if a drunk Jackie Harvey had been the Tweeter, with “Item!” leading it off.
This thread is like reading the comments on an Onion Facebook post. Makes me sad.
A phrase ludicrous enough for The Onion itself to have coined… and to pile on the coincidences, is this if the Elizabeth Hawksworth in question. she’s a dead ringer for Jean Teasdale.
Why do you think she is wealthy?
Why do you think she gets everything she wants in life?
Not the best joke I’ve ever heard, but it’s an easy joke to get and not worth all this outrage. Nothing says offenderati quite like a white university professor complaining about a joke she didn’t get on behalf of a “nine-year-old woman of color.” And Seth MacFarlane sort of called Anne Hathaway cunt at the end of the Oscars*, and it was very funny. But only because she’s white and 30, I guess. So it’s too bad The Onion withdrew this one, but I guess they saw there’s no way to win when half the people are saying you’re sexist and half are saying you’re racist.
*It was something like “Amy Adams, Jacki Weaver, Sally Field and Helen Hunt/
Hathaway took away your Oscars, don’t you think that girl’s a…dorable?”
And the other joke was that Wallis will be too old for Clooney in 16 years, i.e. when she is 25. There’s no child-abuse element to that.
Well, I lol’ed. And if Dakota Fanning were still that age I can absolutely see them making the very same exact joke about her.
Imagine what they’d be saying about Drew Barrymore if she were a teenager now.
Well I never… someone should kick that writer in the pussy.
To my understanding, The Onion always offered progressive, left leaning, witty social commentary.
Statistically, half of it’s readers are college educated white males who make 70,000+ a year. I’m sure they didn’t consider the implications of their audience or the target of the joke.
Which is the problem. For people as funny and smart as they are supposed to be…
From The Onion:
Lame.
I would love it if Quvanzhane came out and said something like “What? I thought it was hilarious!”
I find Steve Hannah’s letter and his need to “discipline those individuals responsible” to be more offensive than the original Tweet.
All I can think to say is ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe.’
I am assuming it is a pick your battles kind of thing. Sure they probably didn’t have to apologize, but when the battle is you versus a ragamuffin nine year-old, that may not where you want to spend time and energy defending yourself.
Is there any reason to believe that’s who the battle was between?
How is calling Quvenzhané Wallis a cunt in a tweet something that demands a public apology from the Onion’s CEO, but thisis okay?
Both use offensive language directed at a real, live human child. But only one of those is causing major wailing and gnashing of teeth this morning. Is it because one’s a celebrity nominated for an Oscar, and the other is just an unfamous baby that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
For the record, I find neither of these Onion pieces offensive, I’m just curious why one is too controversial to keep up longer than 15 minutes and requires certain staff to be disciplined, and the other is considered ok.
Amen.
I guess people understood who was being made fun of in that story, and they did not understand the target of the Wallis tweet.
