Where do we draw the lines of comedy? Do we cross them when a satirical news publication calls a 9-year-old girl the C-word?
Last night, during the Oscars ceremony, The Onion tweeted: “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a [four-letter word that begins with C], right?”
“By 1 a.m. Monday, dozens of tweets per second were being posted, virtually all of them expressing contempt, incredulity or outrage,” reported USA Today.
A comedy website tweeted something more outrageous than they normally do, and people reacted accordingly.
“@TheOnion Identify the writer. Let him defend that abhorrent verbal attack of a child. You call it humor I call it horrendous,” wrote “The Wire” star Wendell Pierce, who also demanded the site apologize.
There seemed to be few people online defending the website for doing its job. Take a look at the front page of The Onion’s website every now and then; you’ll find equally disturbing or offensive content that hardly anybody bats an eyelash toward.
“After being up for an hour, the backlash gathered, and the tweet was deleted,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Kate Aurthur. “Was it meant to be some sort of joke reflecting on how people talk about someone like Anne Hathaway?”
Our first instinct was to assume the tweet was a social commentary on the many different types of hate Hathaway receives, for some reason. But really, what else are we supposed to expect from The Onion? Right now, you can read an article “written” by Daniel Day-Lewis titled “While I’m Glad I Won, I Personally Believe Abraham Lincoln Deserved To Die.”
Have you heard of anyone being all up-in-arms over that whole story? Not at all. The whole thing describes what a terrible person Lincoln was and the award-winning actor who played him in a movie “should have been assassinated much, much sooner than he was.”
Are we condoning The Onion’s behavior toward the young Wallis? Absolutely not. People who write comedic pieces for a living should be able to tell where the boundaries are. Calling a 9-year-old anything more than precocious is not alright.
However, no one should be surprised they did it. Writers and editors of The Onion seem to be continually pushing themselves to be more edgy and to be more “out there.”
Journalist and columnist Joel Stein tweeted: “We got that @TheOnion was making fun of our celeb-obsessed, celeb-jealous, celeb-dissing culture and not Quevenzhane Wallis, right?”
They didn’t convey their point in a non-offensive way. That’s the problem.
On Monday morning, The Onion’s CEO issued an apology. The statement called the tweet “crude and offensive — not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting.”
It seems like a weird line to draw. At what point is something horribly offensive but still funny, and at what point does the CEO of a company have to issue an apology?
