By Greg Beato
The Onion 2.0
Remember when God answered a paralyzed seven-year-old's pleas to walk again with a resounding "No"? How about the time a coalition of porn stars marched on Washington demanding to be "f****d harder"?
In its print incarnation, The Onion regularly employs both appalling meanness and profanity that would make most stand-up comedians blush. But when The Onion News Network, which spoofs cable news in the same 30-frames-per-second way the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report do, made its debut two months ago, one wondered if The Onion's truly wicked spirit could survive the more immediate world of video.
After all, print helps lessen the shock of the fake-news pioneer's satire. It makes the reader complicit -- you have to vocalize all those f-bombs yourself -- and it keeps the sentiments expressed at a cool remove. When you're laughing about the paralyzed toddler who's so happy God finally answered his prayers even though God said "no," you don't actually have to see the child wheeling excitedly around the room or hear the misguided joy in his voice.
Could such a story work in the more immediate world of video? Would The Onion even try to pull it off?
The first video shorts bearing the Onion name were a little disappointing. With a $1 million budget and a staff of 15, The Onion News Network (ONN) clearly has more resources at its disposal than the typical YouTube auteur. But given the level of quality people have come to expect from The Onion, along with the graphic glitz and charismatic bombast that are on display at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report every night, the bar for fake news is extremely high these days. Early ONN spots were a little drab, a little predictable, and most damning in the age of the short attention span, a little plodding.
Ironically, the video incarnation is often a slower-moving beast than the print one. Most stories in the dead-tree edition are never more than a few hundred words, and since their headlines function as punchlines, you don't even have to read those few hundreds to get a laugh. Combine such efficiency with highly visual features like "Statshots" and "American Voices," and you have a product that can be enjoyed in rapid, scattershot fashion.
Meanwhile, an Onion Online News bit like "Report: 70% of All Praise is Sarcastic" -- which might have been presented as an instantly consumable "Infographic" in the print version -- drags on for an interminable ninety seconds.
Happily, The Onion's dark sense of humor hasn't gotten any brighter under the video lights -- so far, the clips that work best are the ones that are the most bleak and tasteless. In one instant classic, the network's stentorian anchor reports that "having a friend with cancer may be beneficial to your health" because of all the exercise-based fund-raising -- marathons, charity softball events, etc. -- it inspires. Then, the spot switches to a guy hovering over the hospital bed of his cancer-stricken friend. "I'm in the best shape of my life," the guy explains as his bald, near-dead pal gazes up at him, and the transgressive immediacy of it all ratchets up the humor to a place where print just can't go.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]