Calling a Kid the "C" Word

[JemothSkarii]

Time to bring one of my favorite Youtubers into this:


He basically says what I'd like to say on the topic. But hey, I'm Australian, swearing to random people is pretty common (at least where I live).

 

[emeraldrafael]

I guess the joke about the C word being cancer isnt appropriate here. well, that and I cant think of something clever.

I get what bob is saying, but even if its for humour, I dont think you should refer to a 9 year old on her biggest day (as of now) in her life that. As much as the onion likes ot joke around, I think they woul have been better off not bothering. I mean, I know the onion likes to be humourous but she's fucking 9.

I dont know, i agree. I think it was dumb to do, and would have been better off left unsaid.

 

[Mouse One]

Thanks for a breath of sanity on this one, Bob. Yes, the joke failed. It was badly delivered, badly aimed, and just bad. But no, it wasn't an attempt to attack the girl. I agree, it would have worked better if they'd done something like a fake opinion piece by a gossip columnist saying over the top snarky things, so everyone would have got who they were satirizing (See George Washington's column entitled "I Thought We'd Have Flying Slaves By Now").

That said, they did a proper apology, not one of those "We're sorry if anyone was stupid enough to be offended" apologies so popular today. The joke may have been far from classy, but the editors actions afterwards were.

 

[Ickabod]

The problem is that it took 2 pages to explain the satire of the joke. That's a problem right there.

Besides even in jest, it's just bad taste to call a pre-teen child that in the first place.

 

[Ghaleon640]

I didn't realize the word was used so much in other countries. It's used in the U.S., but isn't exactly common.
First time I saw the onion, my dad just showed it to me and laughed at my confusion. "How is this news? Are the writers stupid?" Nah younger me, it was just me.

 

[Therumancer]

Well to sound off for myself, I have lost respect for "The Onion" for backing down and issueing an apology. I'm firmly in the court of those who have been complaining about out of control political correctness here, and feel that anything PC needs to be abolished as it's an affront to free speech as a matter of general principle, especially when it comes to humor.

At the end of the day the point of "The Onion" and other sources like it is that nothing and noone is sacred, your supposed to talk at look at a lot of what they say/post and go "wow, I can't believe they said that" and chuckle because of how wrong it is

Whether or not this girl is 9 years old is irrelvent, she's a public person, and fair game for this kind of thing. What's more I think people complaining about this made it more of a big deal that it ever would have been if they decided to keep their mouthes shut and go after their 5 minutes of fame from liberal trolling. Sure, calling a 9 year old a **** to her face is wrong, but remember this is on a humor website/twitter feed which a 9 year old has no business accessing. Had nobody gone "wow, I can get five minutes of fame by complaining and donning a suit of liberal white knight armor" the odds of her ever even having expected this was said would be pretty much obselete. Anyone looking at "The Onion" enough to follow it's twitter also likewise understands the context.

I'll also be blunt, we've been here before, and truthfully this would never have happened if there wasn't a huge trend towards liberal trolling and it being "hip" to jump on stupid crap to make a platform and generate attention. If you start looking at the garbage thrown at some child celebrities over the years, including by sources that weren't joking and taking a "telling it as it is" attitude, you can see how stupid this really is. Briney Spears and Lindsey Lohan got a ton of this crap, and this includes at one point Britney having a recorded tantrum she threw back stage as a little girl broadcast. Perhaps even more relevently society has turned "Honey Boo Boo" into pretty much the punchline of a nationwide joke.

In short it's a non-issue, people are only talking about this because we have been too stupid not to give the people raising these kinds of complaints a platform.

 

[The Material Sheep]

Someone calls my child a ****....there will be blood. I find it amazing how many cowards hide behind anonymity, typing there little blurbs and quips. None of these people will say it in person just like none of you in the thread will call any decent parent's child a **** or a dickhead while in their presence.

It's like basic human decency died at the advent of the internet...

At some point you gotta just not care what other people say that hardly effects you. You can't resort to threats of violence when people saying something you don't like/incredibly stupid. You should dislike it sure, but it's also a really nice indicator of a person you shouldn't associate or interact with anymore.

Just step back and ask yourself. Does what this person say really affect me or those I care about? 95% of the time the answer will be no, and you should just ignore the person. Easy enough.

No. YOU should sit back and allow someone to disrespect you or your family. Criticism is something you can step back and ask those questions, but calling a young girl a **** is something else entirely.

Does it honestly have any effect on you what so ever? Why do you care what some random shithead thinks about you or your family?

 

[xyrafhoan]

I'm glad the Onion retracted the tweet and apologized. They were not censored in any way; they realized the joke wasn't funny and had too little context to ever be funny. The outrage over the Onion apologizing is just mind-boggling. The tweet was offensive, people complained, and the Onion agreed and took the offending tweet down, because in hindsight it just sucked. Then there are people acting like we're behind the Great Firewall of China, but this was just a distasteful gaffe that should have been left to the sands of time. The c-word applied to a talented 9-year-old girl for no real reason is not comedy, not even in the name of satire. There was no set-up, no context, it was just... bad. And it was okay to take a step back and admit it. Kudos, Bob, for explaining why we find jokes funny and why the Onion tweet was not.

 

[Zerstiren]

Moviebob:"Here's the thing: Yes, obviously, it is not okay to call a 9 year-old girl a c**t. 'Why' shouldn't have to be explained (it's a sexualized/gendered insult, reducing a person to their genitals and then shaming them for what said genitals are, this kid is nine freaking years old, etc.,). BUT - and I boldface because this is a big, big, BUT - while what The Onion did was in fact call her that word, they also didn't 'really' do so. It's a weird distinction, I'll grant, but this is what satire is made of."

If I poop in the middle of a public park and call it "art," would pooping on the grass be the only thing I'm doing; or, did I also not poop, because I am putting my artwork on display for the public to see, smell and, if they so wish, taste?

No one can make language a pattern of discrete symbols, tidied into their own distinctive roles for a predetermined context, and neither will certain words or actions always hold the same unique meanings for people, because people change. There will always be an element of uncertainty in human interactions, meaning that one could say or do the same thing over and over again and, on occasion, get a different response. In the case of The Onion, I believe it's safe to say they bombed, big time, and it would be extremely rare, though not impossible, for any other comedian to pull off that kind of joke and get a positive response. That someone certainly won't be me!

 

[kburns10]

The problem is that it took 2 pages to explain the satire of the joke. That's a problem right there.

Besides even in jest, it's just bad taste to call a pre-teen child that in the first place.

This right here. Joke fails on that fact alone. Also, someone mentioned that kids call each other cunts all the time. Yeah, KIDS call each other that. Grown adults don't usually call a kid that.

Putting aside right vs. wrong, these stories are the reason I got rid of my Twitter. Hardly any good comes from it, and it just seems to get people into trouble needlessly.

 

[PunkRex]

I always wondered why it was such a big deal over in America? Don't get me wrong, if a comedian called a 9 year old a **** here in England some people might get pissed but chances are it would be forgotten about by the next day.

The problem is that it took 2 pages to explain the satire of the joke. That's a problem right there.

Basically this, i'll just post the vid, makes it easier on everyone.

 

[Charli]

...I follow Frankie Boyle on Twitter I have so gone beyond help in determining good and bad humour tbh.

 

[Phuctifyno]

Though being only a mild Onion fan, I easily fall into the Onion Defense camp. Here's why:

Has anybody ever read "Our Dumb World"? It's basically an atlas, but written by The Onion.

I'd submit that almost anything from the chapter on Africa is twenty times more offensive than this; it makes fun of the tyranny, starvation, economic disparity, rape, and bloody genocide that plagues many of those countries by delivering true information and statistics in the most blunt or derisive way possible. It doesn't need the obligatory "most offensive word we can get away with that isn't the N-word!!!" to make fun of those unfortunate children; it's terribly tragic, offensive, and hilarious all at once. It works because of The Onion's signature style, in which it isn't the subject itself that is the butt of the joke, but the apathy and ignorance of our own culture. These are the guys who have headlines like "New Study Suggests Depression Hits Losers Hardest" or "Government To Increase Surveillance Of Paranoid Schizophrenics"

Anybody I've seen upset by this either seems to have zero familiarity with The Onion, or just doesn't comprehend that style of humor. Now I'm not blaming 'em, but there are a lot of those people... even on this thread... even after you (Bob) explained it very well in the article... I think they're Capricorns.

This style of humor is specifically designed to make you laugh, be shocked and mad at yourself (maybe embarrassed, maybe even offended) for laughing, then think about why you reacted that way. That's the exact reaction I had when I saw this **** joke, and it all happened in a matter of seconds. I didn't think much of it beyond that. These Capricorns often don't make it past the second step though; they get to the offended part (not realizing that it was intended and also there's more) and just stay there, then rant on the internet about how they never laughed in the first place and somebody else should be blamed for their own taking offense at something or their not getting it.

I've heard the "if you have to explain it, it was a bad joke" rebuttal many times.... and I think it's retarded. I got the joke immediately and I'm pretty dumb.

 

[Korolev]

Bob, I agree with what you said in the 5th paragraph - The Onion have a right to make that joke, and the people who are very angry have a right to be angry. Freedom of speech also implies freedom of criticism. By all means, they can make as tasteless and horrible a joke as they want. Go for it. But others ALSO have a right to criticism them and hate them and shout at them for making that joke.

I see a lot of free speech advocates cry that their free speech is under assault when someone criticizes them. Don't they understand the hypocrisy? "I have the freedom to say whatever horrendous thing I want, but you don't have the freedom to ever dare express objections to it". That's just ludicrous. Free Speech means Free Speech - it means I'm free to criticize jokes I don't like!

It's really, really simple. You have a right to say what you want. You don't have a right to be liked for saying it.

 

[Frybird]

I wish i'd live in an (internet) world where people could just look at something like that and say "Dude, not cool" and move on.

All the stupid outrages about everything makes people look like the idiots they are and most of the time hinder actual discussion about serious topics (up to and including everyone's favorite topic nowadays...the one that begins with an "S" and ends with "ism")

 

[likalaruku]

This is kind of...um.... plain old off-topic forum fodder & not something that should be headlining a video game-based website. Just sayin'......

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

B) SHE'S FUCKING 9! Do you make it an habit to go around insulting 9-year-olds?

Have you been on Youtube? 9-year-olds insult each other constantly! And they punch and kick each other, too. And they pee their pants. Children are disgusting, snot-nosed little bastards to each other and to adults. I don't know why exactly it's so bad that adults are berating children - especially on what is ostensibly a satirical, fake news outlet - but it actually does happen all the fucking time.

At least where I live. This could well be a case of prudish American standards. No sex, no swears, think of the children, etc.

 

[linforcer]

I hadn't heard of this, but I stand firmly with the Onion on this. The joke would have been obvious to me, and even if it had not, calling someone a ****, regardless of what society has chosen that means, to me sounds no different from calling someone a pineapple. You can tell she's not a pineapple and even if she literally was a pineapple, what would that really say about her?

 

[CryoSynth]

They can't all be winners; it's not so easy to tell if a joke is good or not before you put it out there.

The regrettable thing to me is that people aren't so much offended by the fact the girl was insulted but rather solely the word used. The sooner people get over their irrational outrage at a word on a page, the better off we'll all be.

 

[Seneschal]

Ugh. Tweet-comedy. I don't think it's wrong of The Onion to say it; I just wish it was funny. How is "ADORABLE CHILD = ****" funny? Does the whiplash of opposing themes colliding so violently cause one's diaphragm to spasm in a way that can be mistaken for laughter? Maybe. But not in tweet-format.

The Onion in particular should be familiar with the highly explosive properties of badly presented satire; few things tend to blow up in one's face quite so spectacularly. You'd think they'd minimize their risks and stick to the controlled environment of their own site (where I can honestly see the joke as part of a faux-headline and it wouldn't stand out at all) and avoid the limited, easily misconstrued format that is Twitter.

Also, MovieBob, you've put so many words in boldface that the article resembles comicbook dialogue.