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]

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.

Starting from the bottom:

• I said foreign, you guys. People from North America aren’t frightening, because even if they’re batshit crazy, we know them. All of us know a few Michelle Bachmanns or Glenn Becks or Fred Phelpses,¹ and they look like us. As do Canadians — who, moreover, are simply not threatening.
• Castro hasn’t scared anybody for decades. Plus, he’s now like 99 years old and mostly concerned with his pipeline of black-market Depends undergarments. That brother of his who’s supposedly doing the dictatoring now is a total empty shirt. How empty? If dictators were legendary comedians, it’d be like Groucho Marx handing his role over to Zeppo.
• Daleks, huh? I must admit I hadn’t thought of that, so props for being outside the box. OK, this may be geek heresy to some but I’m going there anyway: Daleks dream about being as badass as Cylons, and then they wake up and apologize.
• OMG — Ahmadinejad, right! How could I forget?! Now I feel stupid. Well, he’s clearly The Man now in the scary crazy-ass foreign despot category.

"Beard still there? …Yep, still there. Phew!"

I feel dumb for having forgotten about him, since only last week our ball accidentally went into his yard and he paraded it on TV like it was a fucking UFO or something.

I was like, “Hey, a little help? Could you toss that back over here?”

And he was all, “Look! Look, everyone! I have captured his ball! The accursed imperialist ball that was menacing the skies over my house is in my hands, wretched and defeated! Victory is mine!”

So I’m like, “DUDE. Keep it in your pants, OK? Just chill. Look, it was a bad throw. Oops! Sorry about that. But… what is your problem? ‘Menacing?!?’ Whatever. And it’s not like it hit your car, or broke a window or something. Muthafucka, what are you celebrating for — you didn’t even catch it! You fished it out of your damn hedge after like, five minutes of rooting around, for shit’s sake.”

But dammit if A-jad doesn’t just keep standing there posing, holding it up over his head. So I go, “You know what? FINE. Keep it if it means so much to you. I hope you and the ball have a beautiful life together. I’ve got a whole box of other ones just like it.”

The guy is a nutjob. And get this: the next day I saw him picking my oranges. Can you believe that shit?

Over the last year or two, my most oft-considered theme on this blog may well be the vital necessity of humor to cope with the world around us. As the adage goes, sometimes there are no words — no literal words, that is. No direct response. There is first the intermediary of wit, whose words are oblique enough to make the matter minimally tolerable. Without this humorous buffer, my unfiltered response would be nothing but screams of rage and despair. That might be cathartic for me, but it would definitely not be constructive. To put it another way: if you ask me a ridiculous question, you’ll get a ridiculous answer.

“Sorry Lucretia, no way is that covered.
I mean… you were already naked.”

For the last decade plus, the agenda and tone of the exchange in Washington (or as I call it, our national miscourse) has been set by the Republicans, largely via their hyper-successful media arm at FOX News.¹ As the feckless Democrats stood by, the effective GOP creed has degenerated from Bush-era exclusionism (“We are the party of patriotism; we don’t work with Democrats for the same reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) to reactionary, teabagger-style xenophobia (“If it has Obama-cooties on it, KILL IT!”).

Yesterday, the trusty comedy filter The Onion produced what struck me as a perfectly timed all-purpose riposte, headlined “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.” Unfortunately, it turns out that even this wasn’t quite enough to address the day’s most egregious Obama-phobic extreme: the new GOP majority in the House, as part of their absurdly childish insistence on a do-over of the health care reform act, have declared it necessary to redefine the crime of rape.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wondered. “Is this another satirical sendup of the ludicrous extremity of Republican obstructionism? Is rape the asteroid in this joke? …NO?!? Oh my God. Get me some comic cushioning, stat!”

A legitimate case is often made that there are certain things that cannot be joked about, and that rape is one of them, because rape is not funny. I agree — with the last clause. Rape, in and of itself, is no laughing matter. I respectfully disagree, however, with the statement as a whole. There are times when even things as terrible as rape must be joked about, lest we lose our humanity.

I didn’t even laugh at the above clip when I watched it, but I did find it funny. So funny, in fact, that it kept me from breaking down into unabated primal protest. Losing my shit, as it were. And that, I think, may be the very definition of “pretty goddamned funny.”

The best-laid plans of mice and men: it would have been easy to have compiled a 2010 top ten videos list of which five or more were from The Onion. Going out of my way to avoid this, I ended up with three out of ten from Funny or Die. So much for my little diversity initiative.

Of the bounty of 2010′s Onion-based hilarity, this one is the clear winner:

[click here to watch the video]

Close, but no cigar: “Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere”, “Thousands of Girls Match Description of Missing Sorority Sister” and “O-SPAN Classic: CIA Accidentally Overthrows Costa Rica”.

Wow… just by virtue of these videos’ titles this may be the most profane post in the history of C&B. Might as well make it official. Or rather, fuck it — might as well make this shit official. Shit fuck piss. Goddamned cunt. Cocksucker motherfucker sis-boom-bah. There, that oughta do it.

My man Stephen Colbert made it tough on me in 2010, in a good way. He had enough excellent moments to make selecting just one for my top ten feel almost completely arbitrary. I ultimately went with this one, from the December 16th episode of the Report, for the total force of its hypocrisy-bashing. Make sure you watch the whole clip, because he saves the coup de grâce for the last couple of lines.

My inclusion of this video rather than one of Colbert’s more ballyhooed 2010 moments (the previously-mentioned Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and his testimony on behalf of migrant farm workers before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security) may seem counter-intuitive. Taking the satirical brickbat to hypocrites is hardly new for him — in fact, it could be declared as his primary stock in trade since the Report began in 2005. However, it has not become less necessary in that time. I would argue that it is more necessary than ever.

“What I like best about Bill’s argument,” Colbert declares in the video, “is its complete factual inaccuracy.” Funny, cutting, and true enough to be chilling if you think about its implications. With the campaign and eventual election of Barack Obama as U.S. President, the tide of truthiness has risen to unforeseen levels of absurdity: need I even mention birthers, or ludicrous accusations of socialism and “death panels?” While these falsehoods have been of greater consequence than Bill O’Reilly’s quasi-Christian bullshitting, they represent the same syndrome: the determination of conservative ideologues to create a post-factual America.

Conventional American news media, whose objective is not accuracy but profit, therefore does nothing to stem the tide of misinformation and demagoguery. The premise of “balanced” news coverage (or news commentary, often conflated with coverage) is itself a fallacy. The presentation of opposing viewpoints on a news issue under the imprimatur of fairness is a disservice to the viewer when only one of them is factually sustainable, but both are given equal weight… as is usually the case.

The succinct sub-title over at The Reality-Based Community reads, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Fortunately, we also have satirists like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart on TV to remind us of this.