> 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.
You just don't find their humor funny and that's fine.
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.
It's not good comedy, but the basis of a joke is there.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.