The Onion isn't funny anymore and you can thank both Donald Trump and social media for that

A once-venerable American humor institution is now boring beyond belief

Younger readers may not remember this, but there was a time when the Onion was both a brutal incisive critic of much of American society as well as a masterful cartographer of the hilarious, depressing subtleties of the human condition. That’s not a bad rap sheet for a rag founded by a couple of Wisconsin college students in the 1980s. But you never can predict the contours of how a thing is going to go. I mean, everybody absolutely savaged Tom Cruise like two decades ago for his criticism of the “chemical imbalance” depression thing, but it turns out he was right about that. There’s no use in predicting who’s going to have their finger on the pulse of stuff. 

Well, the Onion did, anyway, at least for the first 25 years or so of its existence. Now it has become a pathetic shadow of its former self, the equivalent of a literary bowl of oatmeal, what Calvin called “pasty, bland, colorless sludge.” That is a shame, because there is no reason the Onion couldn’t have kept on being right for another 25 years, or 50, or forever. Its chief stock-in-trade, after all, was making stuff up, so all it had to do was keep doing that well. But it has failed even at that basic task, giving credence to Chesterton’s observation that it is easier to write a leading article than a joke. 

Why has this happened? I think both the rise of Donald Trump and the ubiquity of social media are probably the most likely culprits. Trump transformed modern progressive political discourse into something that consistently verges on authentically unhinged hysteria; social media, especially Twitter, has amplified that hysterical dialogue into what is an effectively permanent resonance, a self-augmenting amplitude that is so unabating that you now have literally tens of millions of nominally sane Americans who believe that a few dozen unarmed overweight rednecks and weirdos almost took over the United States of America on January 6, 2021. 

To be sure, the Onion, like most media outlets, is and always has been run by progressives. They’ve never been shy about that slant. But their progressive politics were rendered much funnier in years past simply because the environment in which they were being deployed was much more normal and less performative. Because another thing about our politics today, but especially progressive politics, is that it is endlessly, relentlessly performative. In the present era nobody can do a political moment without telegraphing their own sincerely-held convictions on shortwave, often with the finesse of a dull broadsword. This is, again, another effect of social media, which demands intensive performance in exchange for adulation and attention and thus priceless endorphins.

It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when political satire, at least, could be done with less mania and more effectiveness. Here, for instance, is an Onion report from early 2004, amid ultimately successful efforts in Massachusetts to legalize gay “marriage” there: 

Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens To Gay Marry

BOSTON—Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 5-2 Monday in favor of full, equal, and mandatory gay marriages for all citizens. The order nullifies all pre-existing heterosexual marriages and lays the groundwork for the 2.4 million compulsory same-sex marriages that will take place in the state by May 15.

"As we are all aware, it's simply not possible for gay marriage and heterosexual marriage to co-exist," Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall said. "Our ruling in November was just the first step toward creating an all-gay Massachusetts." …

That is intensely funny, because it checks all the right boxes necessary for good Menippean satire, regardless of political persuasion: It takes what the writer views as a particular vice or shortcoming, amplifies it to absurdist levels, and cloaks it in the veneer of stodgy respectability so your mind experiences a weird, troubling dissonance as it tries to figure out what’s what. The intense peculiarity of that experience manifests itself as a dissonant vibration in your sternum that eventually erupts through your trachea as a laugh.

The writeup was obviously meant to lampoon the anxieties that conservatives felt at the growing influence of gay politics in the United States, but it was done in a way that allowed even conservatives to laugh at the joke. Humor, Groucho Marx said, is simply “reason gone mad,” and while there was and is ample reason to be unnerved at the weird LGBT sexual politics of the left, you can still get a kick out of it when it’s been presented in the kind of staid yet madcap style here. It’s good work, plain and simple.

The people writing the Onion back then also understood news copy very well, both how to write it and how to wield it to maximum effect. A state supreme court ordering everyone to gay-marry would be one of the most astonishing reports in the history of western civilization; here it’s styled as essentially a regional space-filler, maybe something you read about on B2. That kind of understated weirdness is a highly effective vehicle for delivering humor, because it’s done so in a language and a cadence that’s immediately accessible to everyone. It’s democratic humor, in the best way possible.

Here, in contrast, is what the Onion is up to these days on the gay humor front, from March of this year: 

Disney Opens New Immersive ‘Star Wars’-Themed Gay Conversion Camp

Boasting of an exciting new experience for die-hard fans who want to “join the rebellion” against their homosexual desires, Disney announced Wednesday the grand opening of an immersive Star Wars–themed gay conversion camp. “At our new Jedi Cure Center, gays and lesbians of all ages can visit a galaxy far, far away, where they will be taught by their favorite Star Wars characters that their sexual orientation is a path to the dark side of the force,” Disney CEO Bob Chapek said of the new $3,000-per-day camp at which clients will be greeted by an animatronic Yoda that tells them being “queer leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.” “Guests will visit the Jedi Temple, where members of the High Council will condemn their deviant behavior and order them to face trials to achieve the rank of heterosexual. Later, in the Emperor’s throne room, they will view photos of attractive members of the same sex before Palpatine administers 450-volt electric shocks to punish them for their arousal. For extreme cases, we even have Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt standing by to stop our guests from being gay by freezing them in carbonite.” Chapek added that at the end of their stay, fans would be allowed to choose a blue or pink lightsaber in accordance with the gender assigned to them at birth.

This is so painfully unfunny that it’s hard to comprehend that this is the same publication. None of it works. For starters, who exactly is the mark for this low-energy humor? It can’t be Disney itself; Disney is one of the most gay-friendly companies on the planet. Gay people love Disney, so much so that gay activists have been staging annual, massive “Gay Days” at Disney World for over three decades. Company executives are all pretty much on board with the gay thing. It makes no sense to suggest that the company is somehow desirous of “gay convsersion camps.” You can’t have effective satire if you’re lampooning absolutely nobody. 

Beyond that, the story here reads like it was written by a painfully oversensitive gender studies major. It certainly fails the test of being compelling news copy, and as a result a considerable portion of the humor element has vanished. “Queer,” “gender assigned at birth,” “achieve the rank of heterosexual.” This is stilted, awkward writing, drawing from both meaningless academic jargon and paranoid campus fantasies about conservative politics. This is not satire; it’s a vehicle for a purple-haired young college grad’s deep-seated socio-sexual anxieties.

Perhaps most glaringly, the writing quality itself has degraded sharply. The earlier copy was sophisticated and elegant in its own outrageous way; the later copy scans like it was written by, and for, people who read maybe one book every 18 months—readers whose attention spans are mercilessly short and whose tolerance for complexity is essentially nonexistent.

Consider, for example, one passage from the earlier report: 

"If the history of our nation has demonstrated anything, it's that separate is never equal," [Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H.] Marshall said. "Therefore, any measure short of dismantling conventional matrimony and mandating the immediate homosexual marriage of all residents of Massachusetts would dishonor same-sex unions. I'm confident that this measure will be seen by all right-thinking people as the only solution to our state's, and indeed America's, ongoing marriage controversy."

That’s great stuff. Now this: 

“Guests will visit the Jedi Temple, where members of the High Council will condemn their deviant behavior and order them to face trials to achieve the rank of heterosexual. Later, in the Emperor’s throne room, they will view photos of attractive members of the same sex before Palpatine administers 450-volt electric shocks to punish them for their arousal. For extreme cases, we even have Boba Fett and Jabba the Hutt standing by to stop our guests from being gay by freezing them in carbonite.”

Bloodless, heavy-handed, uninspired, boring. The former gives you fantastic gems like “separate is never equal” in service to a statewide mandatory homosexual marriage regime. The latter artlessly shoehorns a bunch of clumsy, awkward Star Wars references into a lame joke about “conversion therapy.” The former genuinely sounds like it was uttered by a state supreme court chief justice; the latter doesn’t even remotely resemble the tedious, grinding, soulless corporate-speak for which Bob Chapek is eminently and deservedly known. They can’t even get the linguistic modulation right anymore. This is what separates truly good satire from dreck. 

This is not a unique comparison. The Onion is loaded with this kind of crummy humor today where in years past it used to be composed almost entirely of the sort of markedly hilarious writing of the kind seen farther above. Part of it, as I argued, is the Trump effect, which has essentially pushed progressives into so relentless a zeitgeist that they’re living in a fever dream where Disney is an anti-gay company or something. Social media is probably more fully to blame, though. Twitter and Facebook and TikTok have all effectively become a collective Eye of Providence, to the point that everyone (and especially progressives) must be performing both constantly and comprehensively. Nothing can be done anymore—certainly nothing online—that is not aggressively in service to the hard-left agenda.

It’s not just the overtly political stuff (although increasingly nearly everything in the present-day Onion is at least covertly political). The Onion for years was known as a dynamite clearinghouse of truly phenomenal writing on the middling eccentricities of modern American life, what Elaine Benes called “the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event.” Here is a great report from 2001:

Area Man Likes To Think Of Own Past As Sordid

NORFOLK, VA–Ross Bingham, a married, 34-year-old professional videographer, likes to think of his own past as sordid, sources revealed Monday. …

"Those first few years after college, there were times when I was going out drinking with my friends three or four nights a week," Bingham said. "The low point probably came when I woke up on the couch at my friend's apartment with my coat over me as a blanket. I could barely even remember what had happened the night before. Then I realized I must've fallen asleep while we were drinking beer and watching Fletch. Kinda scary when you think about it."

Bingham characterized his living situation at the time as "pretty out of control," telling coworkers that they probably wouldn't even be able to comprehend how "crazy" it was, not having been there. …

Luckily, at 23, Bingham had a spiritual awakening and realized it was time to turn his life around. The wake-up call was the arrest of best friend and drinking partner Matthew Stackpole. …

This is professional-level stuff. The surface-level joke, of course, is that a news outlet would ever not only deign to report on something of so little material consequence but do so in such painstaking specificity. Yet that is again, in the end, what elevates this from tired satire to true artistry. The full report itself, if you read it, is effortlessly rendered news copy—the partial quotations, the detail-rich tangents that inevitably circle back to earlier lines of inquiry, the photos that editors clearly took the time to either create or compile—and it deploys all of those things in service to chronicling one man’s very normal, very pedestrian, very ridiculous thoughts in a news article. This was a time when the Onion was really trying to fool you that it was a real newspaper, and but for the obviously contrived subject material it easily came close to doing so. That was the narrow space in which the laughs arose.

Here, meanwhile, is a representative sampling of the Onion’s present-day local coverage:

Shoplifter Always Gets Little Adrenaline Rush After Stealing Basic Necessities For Family

Remarking that nothing made her feel more alive than walking out of a store with unpaid items, shoplifter Jessica Thatcher told reporters Tuesday that she always got a little adrenaline rush after stealing basic necessities for her family. “I don’t know what it is, but nothing gets my heart pounding faster than when I go into a store, open my backpack, and fill it with things that my children and I cannot afford and need to survive,” said Thatcher, adding that what started as a fun game of stealing baby formula for her infant quickly escalated to a full-on addiction to pilfering more valuable things like diapers, soap, and medicine. “I know it’s wrong, but once I got a taste of providing basic items like food and water to my hungry children, I really couldn’t stop. I guess I just get this sick, twisted thrill from not watching them starve. Maybe I need help.” At press time, Thatcher expressed relief that she would finally be on the road to recovery after being sentenced to two years in prison for stealing a single loaf of bread.

Har-har-har, hee-hee, you get it? You see the punchline? You see the viciously insightful socio-political subtext? Those dirty old conservatives are so critical of shoplifters, they’re just so icky and judgmental, so the Onion is gonna throw this in their faces: A desperate mother getting a tingly thrill over stealing diapers and Infamil! That will show those nassy old right-wingers what evil hypocrites they are. And just to really ram the point hope, we’ll have this mother getting tossed into prison for stealing a tiny amount of bread, which is just what Republicans would want to happen. This is one funny satire article! I tell you, I am so glad I read that. 

But it’s not funny, obviously—it’s limp, useless, pointless—and it illustrates very neatly the yawning chasm between the truly brilliant and the merely affectatious. Years ago the Onion’s writers knew that form could not be sacrificed for function. You have to put the work into it. You can try to skewer whoever you want to, but if you have a dull, short, non-functional skewer, you’re not going to get anything done. The writers at the Onion today, on the other hand, have discarded not only the larger element of functional satire but even the pretense of any satirical components like irony and incongruity, to say nothing of the gentle but incisive humor for which it was also known. The publication that once wrote the definitive dispatch on dorm room RAs has essentially become the Facebook feed of that one inordinately angry progressive dude you went to high school with: Unfunny, joyless, never not political, a total bore. 

These are, again, the end results of both an increasingly relentless post-Trump progressive ideology coupled with the insatiable, manic demands of the social media landscape. And it is worth underscoring the latter to emphasize another element of the Onion’s decline. You may notice, if you click through, that all of the earlier articles cited above are fairly lengthy, while the newer examples are all one-paragraph squibs. The Onion used to have a very equitable mix of both per issue—the lengthy, absurdly detailed feature reports, coupled with several “News in Brief” writeups—and yet now it seems to truck almost exclusively in the shorter form, sacrificing a valuable prolonged format in favor of the kind of content made for minuscule attention spans that dominates our social media discourse these days. 

The qualitative declension has extended even to the publication’s news-in-pictures feature, the shortest gag format the Onion offers and one that has always been good for a quick, effective laugh. Here’s one from 2004, for instance:

It’s hard not to laugh at that one: It’s irreverent, brutal, random, bloodless, unapologetic, hilarious. Here’s what they’re working with today:

Oh it’s so bad it’s almost criminal. They took America’s Finest News Source and made it into a group blog for seventh-graders. 

It’s sad to see. I suppose it was inevitable given the way things have gone over the past decade or so: Everything, increasingly, has become not merely politicized but ever-present and ever-monitored. We have seen environments similar to that throughout world history—Soviet Russia, Communist China, left-wing communes—and we know that humor is invariably the first thing to go. Maybe, one day, things will calm down, we’ll all get off social media, and the Onion will start to be funny again. If that doesn’t happen, at least there’s always the back issues; be sure to buy your copies before Google destroys them.