A tweet by the once-dominant satire site “The Onion” has sparked a battle on “Twitter/X” and in the conservative blogosphere:
Your Ethic Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Are the objections by conservatives and Trump fans hypocritical in light of the Right’s widespread mockery of progressive reactions to insufficiently sensittive or politically incorrect humor?
“The Onion Thinks It’s Funny Corey Comperatore was Murdered at Trump’s Rally,” protests Legal Insurrection. “The tweet has over 80,000 likes, too. What is wrong with people!?” “The Simpsons'” Krusty the Clown might ask, “Too soon?” The black humor attempt is certainly no more insensitive than the jokes about the Japanese tsunami that got the late Gilbert Gottfried fired as the voice of the Aflack duck, and, I blush to say, I found those both horrible and amusing.
Is this joke especially over the line because a firefighter was killed? Is it suspect because those 80,000 hearts seem likely to be motivated more by hatred than an appreciation of sick humor? I remember the halcyon days of dead baby jokes and “What’s the name of an armless, legless man you hang on the wall?” “Art!”
My default position about comedy is the same as that articulated by Jerry Seinfeld and (yechh) Bill Maher. If it makes anyone laugh, it’s a defensible joke. And you?
Ethics Alarms 
The Onion is by definition unethical as it’s proven itself not satire but propaganda hiding behind a veneer of “takes shots at all facets of society”.
So nothing it produces can be ethically acceptable.
You’re allowed a certain amount of gallows humor, and that’s definitely gallows humor. That said, the people killed at that rally were innocent of any wrongdoing other than attending the wrong rally, and all of them had families who were innocent of any wrongdoing. So…
I’ll go with mildly humorous. I cracked a smile when I read it, and I think you have to be in a perpetually offended mindset to take issue with it.
But hey, I still like the joke: “What do you call a leper in a hot tub? Stu!”
A classic. My mother loved leper jokes. She was…unusual.
Why did they stop the leper baseball game?
Someone dropped a ball in left field!🤣
What do you call a guy in the ocean with no limbs?
Bob! 🤣
Honk! Honk! Wocka! Wocka!
Why did they have to stop the leper hockey game?
There was a face-off in the corner.
Sixth grade. 1963.
it was still knocking around when I was in 7th grade 20 years later. Guess we should be careful with that joke, it’s an antique.
What do you call a quadriplegic water skiing?
Skip!
What do you call a quadriplegic sitting on your door step?
Matt!
I could unfortunately, go all day.
Of course, the classic of the cruel genre is the joke with the punchline, “Well, you’re fucked now!“
You think that joke’s sick? They’re pikers!
My Leprosy Queen Darryl Rhoades
First heard that on “Dr.Demento!”
Ha, I think that may well be where I heard it…although it might have been on WREK (GA Tech student station).
I don’t have a problem with it (then again, I worked EMS in various forms for about 20 years, so dark humor appeals to me, You won’t last a month in that world otherwise).
I do find it interesting that The Onion – which was once brilliant – now finds itself hopelessly chasing the turbocharged 18-wheeler that is the Babylon Bee.
I will never forget being repulsed by Bill Maher when only weeks later, he dressed up for Halloween as Steve Irwin in a khaki outback get-up with a stingray’s stinger sticking out of his heart and blood all over his shirt. That to me was some sick shit and not the least bit funny….And I laugh at nearly everything.
Oh my God. He did that? Whoa.
I’m just as guilty. When I was younger, if some horrible thing happened, the next day everyone including me would start in with the jokes.
The space shuttle Challenger exploded, and the next day we were all making jokes about how they knew this or that crew member had dandruff because their Head and shoulders was found in the wreckage.
However many people it was were burned to death in The siege in Waco, and the next day we were all joking about how David koresh was found wearing charcoal gray pants and a smoking jacket.
America goes to war in Iraq and we were all joking about how the weather over there was now warm and “bomby.”
This is before we even get into some of the sick stuff about the past like the Holocaust jokes or slavery jokes.
What’s the difference between a snow tire and a slave? Snow tires don’t start singing when you put the chains on.
What’s the difference between a cake and a Jew? Cake doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.
Evil.
I’m not much for gallows humor (I was in the US Army Infantry and I’ve heard a lot more than most POG’s) so I’m not real fond of the Onion’s sick joke; that said, I really don’t care if others enjoy that kind of humor just don’t expect me to laugh along with you.
To each their own.
I think the problem with the joke is that it seems structured more like a mean-spirited jab than a friendly joke. That’s not to say it isn’t funny; it just doesn’t come off as particularly friendly, especially coming from a known-biased source like the Onion has become.
I think there is a better joke along these same lines, but I don’t know what it is. (I’ve never been the best at constructing jokes.)
Either way, I don’t think it particularly worth getting mad about, but I think that about most things people get mad about.
“[I]t just doesn’t come off as particularly friendly, especially coming from a known-biased source like the Onion has become.” Close enough. It comes off as standard issue Trump deranged propaganda, which is relentlessly vicious and condescending. It’s not supposed to be funny, it’s just nasty. And besides, “Trump lies. People leave his rallies all the time.” The demise of The Onion is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened in the history of satire.
I’m not willing to assert that quite so confidently, though I consider it likely.
Its the kind of joke that some of my friends might make spur-of-the-moment while watching the debate (if we had done that). There, at least, I can be confident that it is a good-faith joke, as much at the fact checkers as the death itself. It is also, however not one we would make in so-called “polite” company; it is one which we would make precisely because we know each other well, and know it will be recognized as a joke.
I think the joke would hit much better if it were (like I described in verbal form) interspersed within a transcript-with-commentary than it does out-of-context on Twitter. As it is, however, like you said:
Oops, missed a comma after “however”.
“The demise of The Onion is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened in the history of satire.”
When you consider its 2000-2001 move from the 77 Square Miles Surrounded By A Sea Of Reality to NYC, not so much
PWS
So far all of the jokes made here about dead babies, lepers and armless men are all created without a specific individual in mind and outside of a known reality. The onion joke is targeted at someone with a name. I believe that is what makes this joke different. Would you make a dead baby joke when a parent just lost their child?
I love gallows humor but we would not make jokes about Sandyhook or the killing of someone else with a name.
And of course people leave Trump rallies, they have jobs and homes to go to.
No one leaves a Harris rally early because they only get paid after the event
Bing! Bing! Bing!
Exactly. Political cartoons aren’t funny. They’re not humor. They’re propaganda.
“The onion joke is targeted at someone with a name. I believe that is what makes this joke different.”
That seems a valid distinction, even if you appreciate the cleverness of the joke.
Though the Onion’s joke seems to me an attempt at hiding ugliness behind humer, the joke seemed to be playing off Kamala’s comment that Trump’s rallies were boring.
I was think that Trump should have said something like “Yes they are boring, the best boring, i’ll take that as a compliment, and it’s a problem like your lack of policies. Or, rather it was a problem and my best people couldn’t come up with anything excicting…. Then I was shot in an attempted asassination! and that got things going.”
I get the joke.
It is insensitive toward, in essence, a single private family.
It doesn’t offend me.
It did not make me laugh.
I think part of the reason I did not find it particularly funny is that it seems like standard political humor.
Political humor just doesn’t strike me as funny anymore. (I will have to think about that some more.)
Maybe it is because most political humor seems like it’s just about taking cheap shots at the other side. And, cheap shots are cheap for a reason; they don’t take a lot of effort to make them.
-Jut
Bill Maher and all the others of his ilk who arose, I don’t know, during the Bush Two years, are tedious hacks. They’re not funny, they’re lefty, baby boomer, elite scolds. And they are incredibly tiresome.