One long-running, almost eternal feature of The Onion is its "What Do You Think?" vox pop column. Back in the early days of the paper they took pictures of half-a-dozen people who wouldn't mind having their faces associated with what would often be some rather alarming sentiments. The original faces can be seen about halfway down this Substack article where it says "Gay Clergymen." Pretty basic, but it was a reliably funny feature.
In new issues they're still using those pictures. But in archive articles from decades ago they've replaced the models. While it's hard to explain why, these faces aren't as funny as the old ones. They're also too uniformly young to be a random sample outside of a college campus.
The Onion isn't what it used to be. For a while The Babylon Bee appeared to be outcompeting it, although at this point both publications are run by political hacks, just of differing stripes. Still, it's got an august history. Why the Orwellian stuff?
3 comments:
Like so many other institutions it appears that The Onion was eventually taken over by young people who imagined all they had to do to make the site more interesting to its target audience was to replace the 'What Do You Think?' photographs of prior years with fresh new faces. You're right about the new ones looking characterless.
Since The Onion has always been a satirical news source its job was to make up ridiculous but slightly plausible news stories. For the past few years the real news has been so wildly ridiculous I imagine they've struggled in vain to come up with stories weirder than reality.
I've looked at the Babylon Bee every so often but it's rare to find anything really amusing - the following headline: 'Nobel Peace Prize Committee Clarifies That Creating Peace Is Not A Criteria For Winning' - was the best this time around. In general, it leans too heavily on Christianity.
When The Onion was good it was very good indeed. My favorite was the 9/11 issue that came out two weeks after the event. I was delighted to find someone on Substack had written about in 2021:
https://onion20.substack.com/p/the-onions-911-issue-20-years-later
thank you for noting this, and for linking to my Onion Substack! The black-and-white headshots were replaced by early 1999 (https://theonion.com/the-global-warming-crisis-1819558893/). My guess is The Onion didn't have color versions of the original group. My understanding is that tthe replacements were also local people.
This article offers some great detail (and I've heard similar things from former Onion staffers): https://triviahappy.com/articles/who-are-the-people-in-the-onions-american-voices-the-top-10-questions
Probably a lot of institutions lose their way as new people take over and don't understand how they got successful in the first place. It's also likely true that it's harder to exaggerate what's happening in the real world now. I imagine that's a cyclical thing in history. People in the future will--assuming the survival of the race, yada yada--have fun talking about our era.
That headline about the Nobel Peace Price is good. What generally seems to have happened with the Bee is a kind of audience capture. They've adopted a set of sacred cows, making their satire more like propaganda.
I'd forgotten much of the Onion's 9/11 issue but it turns out they did a fine job under pressure. I liked "Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York."
James, thank you for commenting. And thank you for the link to that article on the American Voices. Bill Harris has had his picture attached to some of the most appalling vox pops, which is to say the funniest.
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