Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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> The safeword is in the title: The Babylon Bee

Yep. The Babylon Bee is sort of “double satire”: that is, it is an (unintentional) parody of a satirical newspaper, which at first glance looks like a joke before you read more closely and realize that the authors are barely literate and without a sense of humor. Like a written analog of Ben Garrison cartoons.

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Even incompetent and tasteless parody is still clearly speech protected by the first amendment, as the Onion brief author explains.

> which at first glance looks like a joke before you realize that all of the authors are barely literate and entirely without a sense of humor

You just don't find their humor funny and that's fine.

What's funny about the thing linked to? The satirical claim is that Applebee's is banning Greene from to go online ordering.

Where's the joke? Is the joke simply a company is being mean to a Republican? This is one of those things in the realm of "I know it didn't happen but it's totally something they would do" except that it never happens.

Is it commentary to the story that a completely unrelated restaurant continued to impose a vaccine mandate despite being called out on twitter by Greene? If so, how?

That's the Bee's problem, most of their jokes aren't. They're really just mostly insults. And they really only insult one type of person.

Whereas, I can go to The Onion and tell you why https://www.theonion.com/high-schoolers-given-detention-for-... is funny and/or satirical without even getting into the actual article.

American schools are ridiculously strict and also the subject of way too many shootings. Even the fact of considering the act of fleeing from a shooter as "cutting class" is just outrageous. It's taking things that have actually happened, slightly exaggerating them, and then combining them into something that is too absurd to be believed.

The joke is that corporations do performative political acts to appear socially conscious. They are using hyperbole based on this stereotype to joke that Applebee's (a relatable family diner) has done something incredibly minor (limiting the scope to "to-go orders" while still allowing her to sit down) as a political stunt. The joke arises from the contrast between the seriousness of the allegations and the minorness of the punishment.

It's not good comedy, but the basis of a joke is there.

So, like in the realm of something that doesn't happen but we're going to say it totally happens because of... reasons.

It's not even in the realm of hyperbole, is it. It may want to be, but it's not. And unless this is something common to "relatable family diner(s)", singling out Applebees is also a head scratcher. The "joke" here is "fucking liberals". When the "fucking liberal" in this case is just a random ass pull.

It's a combination of odd reaches and odd selection of targets that makes one more say "what?" than anything else.

Where I come from the name "Applebees" is mockingly used interchangably with TGIFridays, Chilis etc. because the menu and dining experience is mostly indistinguishable from brand to brand.

Right, but none of them are doing anything like this. It would make sense if Applebees was doing something similar so you can do the comparison. Or if these chain Americano restaurants had a history of these types of actions so you can do that comparison. But neither of those things are true.

It's why I contrasted it with the Onion's headline about students fleeing school shootings getting detention. All the links to events are there to be made. The Applebees thing lacks those links. In this case Applebees is standing in for Twitter. Which is just a weird stand in. It would be funny if the headline was that MySpace was proactively banning Greene for blah blah blah. Because MySpace is also a social media company, but completely irrelevant, so it's funny because it's essentially "you can't fire me, I quit".

> So, like in the realm of something that doesn't happen but we're going to say it totally happens because of... reasons.

Kind of like how schools don't actually give students detention for missing class during shootings, but the onion said it total happens because of...

It's the same thing. The Onion does it much better, but it's still satire.

I wouldn't fault someone for enjoying the Onion but not being a fan of the Babylon Bee though. In addition to having worse writers the Bee is also limited to pandering to the worldview of their target audience which doesn't always have a solid basis in reality. It's easy for their jokes to fall completely flat when they're a scathing critique of something imaginary, but if you were a believer in the fantasy you'd probably feel the Bee was much more entertaining.

That said, the Bee does manage to land some solid hits at times and I suspect the cognitive dissonance that can cause may make some people uncomfortable which could also sour their enjoyment a bit.

Honestly that's probably one of the few Babylon Bee headlines that are somewhat decent. You can see why it's probably funny to their audience, they are like "lol stupid commie liberal restaurant virtue signaling". Overall it's pretty funny to me because their own audience that presumably should find it funny would fall for it and get riled up if they don't already know what the Babylon Bee is. It would also be somewhat funny if Applebee's was out here banning individual politicians.

Most of their content isn't that great though. It seems to range from boomer jokes like "NFL Fires Neurologist After Learning His Concussion Protocol Was Just To Look For Cartoon Tweeting Birds Flying Around Player's Head" to the completely stale "X identifies as Y" type.

> What's funny about the thing linked to? The satirical claim is that Applebee's is banning Greene from to go online ordering.

You have to look at when it was published, Jan 4, 2022. The previous day news dropped that both Facebook and Twitter suspended MTG for misinformation.

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