A place to share and discuss stories from The Onion, Clickhole, and other satire.
Great Satire Writing:
I ate the onion. This is on point.
Uh, brb, I’m off to write & submit a movie script…
I ate it too. In China, they do this with their cinema, and I partook heavily of that product for many years, so it felt familiar.
I legitimately expect there to be something negative about unions in it. Whether it's a "corrupt union boss" or a union strike blamed for something bad happening.
I feel like they might be more clever than that. They will make it organized crime, make them incompetent mooks being manipulated by some fake humanitarian that is funneling charity into evil. Then a tech oligarch will help Bond at a critical time, and they'll be like "It's a good thing this small business owner happened to have a billion dollars that he earned through legitimate, moral effort."
Oh shit, I bit that onion a tad too hard. What has the world come to?
Think about this; "Thunderball" and "Goldfinger" where Bond assaults women with impunity were considered fine for kids to watch, and even generated children's toys.
Heck, there was a toy Xenomorph for 1979's Alien too! And that was even weirder because Alien was R rated and theoretically no children should have been allowed to watch it.
We had that toy as kids. We never saw the movie (still haven't to this day), we just thought it was cool.
This is a good story.
Back when it first came out, "Steve" was at a party and heard some people talking about the movie. He hadn't seen it, and politely listened. He heard the entire plot, including all the twists and a dozen spoilers. Later that week he was with another group and they decided they wanted to see the movie. Steve didn't want to spoil everyone's fun, so he went, even though he thought he'd be bored.
Later, he wrote about how, even knowing the plot and the surprises, he was still on the edge of his seat for the whole movie.
There's a reason people are still talking about this decades old movie.
Funny enough I haven't actually heard a single spoiler for it. I only vaguely know about it, and it's been on my "maybe watch if I have nothing else one day" list for at least a few years. I haven't actively avoided it, but I haven't actively tried to seek it out either. I'll get to it one day, spoiled or not.
Good story in any case.
If and when, you'll probably realize that you've been watching spoilers for years and didn't get the connection.
References that people who have seen it know but people that haven't don't are references done right. They're not a spoiler at that point.
But yes I've had the same experience with many of the TV shows that are popular on places like here and reddit, the office, sunny, parks etc. You start seeing how many comments are just people referrencing stuff.
Yeah it would be terrible if James Bond was used as some kind of cheap propaganda tool. Could you imagine James Bond - a sexyfied whitewashed secret agent of a globe-spanning colonial empire - being used as propaganda. What a world that would be…
Ah, you got me. It was just cartoon villain enough.
lmao I would absolutely watch a satire like this.
Does anyone know if any series ever satired itself? Especially with the same actors?
Ian Fleming crated the characters in "The Man From UNCLE" Napoleon Solo and April Dancer. The UNCLE shows were pretty tongue-in-cheek.
TIL
[nsfw] there's an episode of Mad Men where young Sally Draper finds her womanhood while watching a young David McCallum fighting the forces of evil.
There are a lot of things close to that in scifi. The Starship Troopers movie is a satire of the book it's based on, and the Orville is a satire of Star Trek with a lot of Trek actors taking part.
The pinnacle of self-parody though is, of course, Star Trek: Lower Decks
They're going to modernize plots of old unionization climaxes where they were like "if you won't acknowledge our union we're going to fucking blow up the factory and you will have nothing" and they'll twist it in to a sob story about how the unions are terrorists and how the factory owner has a family and children and :'(. Surprised more of it hasn't already happened lol.
Almost ate the onion with this one 😅
Just going to be a lot of shitty careless union workers that Amazon can't terminate.
Before you say "living wage", they'd still be shitty careless workers.