The Onion youtube vids of the late 2000's were phenomenal. It was all downhill from there imo. Take a look at this recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2niC4ACCp20. I don't like Taylor Swift but this is just not funny. I don't see what the point of it is is.

Compare to this celebrity satire of the golden era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QisdRPwEM.

I think the problem is that American politics has become so polarized, that humor anywhere is more likely to be partisan political and written directly in reaction to that week’s events. The development has been observed for late-night television, and it’s not a new thing with The Onion either: already over a decade ago, friends who had grown up on classic 1990s Onion were bemoaning this shift. Sure, The Onion had used political figures in jokes before (“Congress Debates Rush”, “Clinton Declares Self President For Life”) but those politicians could have stood for anything; there was very little reference to specific policies or controversies.

Nah, my dude. 90's Onion was peak, todays Onion is weak.

https://imgur.com/a/Jhk4CPq

Oh come on now. The world wasn't just sent to live with it's auntie and uncle in Bel-Air. The distressed sullen worldview might be new to you, but people certainly had it back when I found the Onion regularly quite enjoyable too.

I opened Babylon Bee and all I saw was mockery of already marginalized people. I guess that's funny if you hate them.

Babylon Bee notoriously punches down and is the epitome of the "one joke" trope.

They're an uninspired impersonation of The Onion, with a clear political purpose.

Browsing their site I found an article that is making light of the suppression of women voters by using sexist tropes.

> Hundreds of thousands of women across America were left standing utterly clueless as to what to do at a voting booth after their husbands failed to tell them who to vote for.

> Voting at several polling stations ground to a halt after all of the booths became occupied by bewildered women. "This is a disaster," said poll worker John Bingham. "We've had thirty women taking up every booth for the past three hours, just staring like deer in headlights. We offered to bring them lunch while they made their choice, but they couldn't decide on a restaurant."

> At publishing time, voting stations had been forced to designate one voting booth for men only to allow voting to continue.

Given the history of women's right to vote, current laws causing women to needlessly die, and that many women today are undoubtedly being coerced by spouses to vote a certain way, calling this simply tone deaf would be extremely charitable. It is only truly funny if you have "women, am I right" as one of your shibboleths. Without that, it is clear misogyny.

All this to say I don't think a site promoting sexist views is a good alternative for a site that has made a master-class punchline out of trying to take a terrorist bigot off the air.

The Babylon Bee has gotten better, but it's still pretty amateurish compared to the best of The Onion. It's nice to have a satirical publication that leans the other way for balance.

Honest question: how so? The Onion has always billed itself as a "news" source, and parodied both form and content of traditional newspapers and TV news. The Babylon Bee seems to just put out jokes, without much of a unifying thematic framework.

The Babylon Bee occasionally takes a good swipe at liberals and democrats.

The Onion will go down in history as one of the most influential satire projects of all time, and is filled with genuinely talented writers and comedians. Even their early Youtube work was prescient and brilliant.

They aren't even playing the same game.

i disagree, they try to be a more right-wing version of the onion but they lack the surrealism of the onion.

comparing both instagram pages, BB posts mostly political content and they're all critical of democrats/liberals. the onion's page has much more variety

https://youtu.be/8wHMaJ6AtNs?feature=shared&t=8

LOL conservatives

One option for the onion is to end being an entertaining opinion journal with very nuanced and layered (intended) points of view. They already are almost there, what place do they have where so many in the media are parodies of themselves ?

You think the world has gotten dumber? By the numbers it’s smarter even if it’s unevenly distributed and less smart than people’s vain sense of cultural identity leads them to believe.

For example; ~15% in the US have earned more than a bachelor’s. While public polls show people believe close to 50% have a PhD. Close to 50% have a bachelors.

So the majority misunderstand ground truth but understand how to abstractly find the answer.

Seems better to have people know how to count their way out of a bag and miss some inane specific than everyone being actually uneducated.

If life could stop imitating art now, I'd appreciate it very much.

It's like the conundrum that the writers of South Park had, reality became worse than the worst they could think of. To the point where they really struggled when Trump actually won in 2016.

They started distributing hard copies again to folks who sign up.

The lack of copies on street corners has a lot more to do with the collapse in print advertising revenues than it does the jokes printed inside.

You can buy hard copies again if you subscribe. They used to give it away free in the 1990s because the world wasn't as hyper-capitalistic and it was practical to publish a free paper and put metal boxes on the street to distribute it while making a modest profit with advertising.