The Onion, the joke-news newspaper/website, isn't particularly funny. This won't come as a huge surprise to any longtime Onion readers, but I think it has become even more halfassed in recent years. I hesitate to conjecture that my sense of humor has matured, because I'm about as purile as you can get, this side of junior high. Maybe the lustre of Onion has simply rubbed off for me, but I suspect I detect a decline in the quality of Onion gags. Today, for instance, they had an “Opinion” piece supposedly written by a third-grader whose dream, for when she grows up, is to become a bikini model. They take great pains to make sure it is well known that this kid is from a redneck family, because mocking the working class is funny. Meh. Whatever. To a little kid stuff like that does look pretty glamorous. When I wsa that age, I thought the boobie-bikini models in the hot-rod magazines were supermodels like Cindy Crawford, and that Miss America was probably somebody pretty important…not as important as the President, but probably as important as Vanna White, who made the letters appear on Wheel of Fortune. I mean, as far as I knew, she controlled who won the puzzle. Kid logic.
Anyway, the Onion. They are always mocking poor people, because poor people are so amusingly ignorant. Nevermind that many poor people live in areas where the schools suck, and don't have the resources for further education, and were never given to understand the benefits that can come of higher education. Being ignorant is not the same thing as being stupid, and I know there are a lot of people out there with plenty of street sense or horse sense or common sense, who are plenty intelligent, but lack the fancy vocabulary, the authoratative career, and the sense of entitlement that helps them present themseves as Important Bigshots. Granted, there are some ignorant people who are just butt-stupid, and are so stubbornly attatched to being bass-ackward, thick-skulled idiots that you can only assume it is their lizard brains that have kept them going this long.
Wow, I continue to totally fail to make my point about the Onion.
The Onion is, in my opinion, tired, repetitive, shoots sitting ducks, and has lost its few hilarious moments that it has had in the past. It seems to be getting less and less intelligent. I mean, at one point in time, it had a press release about English grammar reverting to the grammatical conventions of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, ect., and today, they had an “announcement” section announcing which fictitious strippers were to be preforming at what fictitious locations. The cleverness levels seem to be dropping. I suspect a slow leak.