2024-08-19 14:50:18
It is a success of the article “Clinton sends vowels to Bosnia”published in 1996 in The Onion magazine, which made it clear to the Onion editorial team that they had to change something. The US government decided to give Bosnia the letters A, E, I, O and U, making countless Bosnian names easier to pronounce, the article read. Essentially the bloody Bosnian phase of the Yugoslav war is over, and the US public is familiar with the South Slavic dialect, which has few vowels, and its corruption (hands on heart, you or your friends have never had a break .on the Adriatic island of “Krrikk”?).
The joke took. The article appears on countless websites, often without attribution. Also because the source has no internet presence at all. “The Onion”, founded in 1988 by two students as a weekly magazine with articles that look like newspapers but are nonsense, was previously only available in print. That has changed now. The Internet people were true to themselves, telling George W. Bush during the Iraq campaign that the country’s nightmare of peace and prosperity was coming to an end.
Everyday things are also funny in “The Onion,” which tells the story of a man who is disturbed by the thought that his girlfriend makes sexual comments about other men as often as she thinks about sex with other women. Or about a woman who panicked before visiting her parents. Such jokes can also be understood as commentary on the newspaper for which Mary Condo and couples therapy are guaranteed for prints and subscriptions. This speaks for the vibrancy with which “The Onion” perceives the media world.
The print edition stopped in 2013. If “The Onion” offers a newspaper printed again in hyper-digitalized 2024, it will sound like a joke. But perhaps this time we can read the signs of the better times. Maybe there was something to it when editor-in-chief Jordan La Flure told the New York Times that 18-year-olds still buy Taylor Swift records on vinyl. So it may be that there is a place for fun that we click “Onion” again.
So did satire save us from the death of the newspaper? Maybe not. In The Onion, the printed newspaper now comes in a package with all kinds of subscriber-exclusive offers, merchandise and events. As an addition. Not as the first thing. But at least something.
#Onion #printed #word