Back in January of 2011, the reliably hilarious satirical web site The Onion branched out into broadcast TV. Onion News Network was renewed for a second season and can be seen on IFC. A second show, Onion SportsDome, appeared on Comedy Central but was cancelled in June. SportsDome can’t be called a total loss, however, because it produced at least one terrific segment which has continued as a weekly feature on the web.
“Get Out of My Face” (often referred to by the delightful acronym “GOOMF”) is a brilliant parody of the dick-swinging, rapid fire sports pundit barking match shows which have become a staple for ESPN — ones like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption.1 The Onion’s first installment of GOOMF appeared in the summer of 2011, and it laid me out laughing:
[rated NSFW]
Per IMDb, I am pleased to inform you that the stars of GOOMF are Robb Pruitt as Kenny Kennedy and Levan Reid as Doc Brooks.
One of the things I love about GOOMF is the deliberate graphic overload, which is barely an exaggeration of the number of shiny bells and whistles that often clutter up the screen on SportsCenter. It’s impossible to catch all of the silly headlines that scroll by on the bottom-margin news ticker and pay full attention to the characters’ dialogue in a single viewing; if you don’t have time for multiple viewings of the clip, I transcribed them all here for your quick reading convenience.
For the slightly more serious-minded, the style being parodied in this video was recently the subject of a trenchant article in The Atlantic by Patrick Hruby, entitled “The SportsCenter-ization of Political Journalism.” The jist:
Turn on ESPN. There are score tickers and headline crawls, slick graphics and constant teases for upcoming stories, everything creating a sense of urgent immediacy. Now switch to Fox News. Visually speaking, it’s the same eyeball-grabbing formula. (Well, replace scores with stock prices, and garrulous sportscaster Chris Berman with a frosted blonde news babe). This is the SportsCenter-ization of the news, in which coverage of Washington — and the world, really — apes a glossy entertainment product dedicated to spectacular touchdowns, gee-whiz statistics, prefabricated drama, insta-debates waged by a nattering, revolving-door athletic punditocracy and the very latest updates on Brett Favre’s various bodily appendages.
If the Broncos beat the Patriots later today, watch tomorrow for Fox News to start ginning up a Tim Tebow write-in campaign for the remaining GOP primary states.
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