Assyrian sports drink

Here’s The Onion with A SUBTLE, UNSETTLING PIECE on the adoption of an obscure Assyrian eagle-god as the mascot for a sports drink.

Most parody ends up having a punch line– an exaggerated moment that caricatures the parodied entity beyond the point of belief. This is not only supposed to be good for a laugh, but I think it also helps reassure us that the parody is, in fact, a parody. It keeps the parody at a distance.

What The Onion often does so well is skip the punch line. There are times like this article when, although you suspect that the article is too weird to be true (and of course you know it can’t be true anyway, because it’s in The Onion) it is somehow disturbingly indiscernible from a true story.

That’s one category of Onion article. Another category is where the article does sound like a parody, but then reality follows along not too far afterward. The best example of that is the famous, profane, and hilarious “F*** EVERYTHING, WE’RE DOING FIVE BLADES” classic, written by an exaggerated version of an aggressive Gillette executive, and then of course Gillette did follow with five blades a couple of years later. (And by the way, I use it. It’s a great shave.)

Perhaps a taxonomy of Onion articles would be sufficient to give us a complete taxonomy of parody types. It amazes me that they’ve managed to stay consistently this good for this long. They generally fall flat only when they take shortcuts with cruelty, the same thing that killed other humor media/figures such as Spy magazine (the American one) and David Letterman.

If you start making fun of people’s appearance or sexuality or physical/mental handicaps, you’ll know you’ve reached the end of the line as a humorist. I cancelled my subscription to Spy when, in one issue, they had one photo of a morbidly obese celebrity with his shirt off, and one photo of another celebrity with a stain on his pants, along with a description of another group of people as “pasty geeks.” Was any of that really necessary? I think not, and it was the end of my subscription. If you’re on a comic roll, you don’t need to stoop to that level, and everyone knows it; it’s always a last resort.

But at least they published my letter explaining why I was canceling: one of my earliest publications, in fact.