Crafting Hyperreal Spaces for Comic Insights: The Onion News Network's Ironic Iconicity

Abstract

In 2007, the flagship humor publication, The Onion, launched the Onion News Network (ONN), a comic news organization producing online sketch videos. This article argues that ONN is a distinctive form of hyperreal social critique that uses ironic iconicity, rather than slapstick or the usual tomfoolery of much comedy programming, to invite rhetorical insights about contemporary media events and political practices. ONN's videos draw attention toward communicative dynamics, creating spaces for alternative civic understandings through a televisual technique that imitates but also reconfigures the structure, delivery, or content of mainstream news broadcasts like CNN and Fox News. Although not without limitations, this ironic iconicity crafts a multimodal online rhetoric and demonstrates the contingency, recursivity, and judgment of news communication norms and practices.

Keywords:

• Comedy
• Hyperreal
• Ironic Iconicity
• Onion News Network
• Rhetoric

Acknowledgments

This article was presented at the 2009 International Society for Humor Studies conference in Long Beach, CA.

Notes

I draw on both artistic and philosophical definitions of the “hyperreal.” In art, the hyperreal has been conceived of as “extremely realistic in detail” (see www.askoxford.com/results/?view=dev_dict&field-12668446=hyperreal&branch=13842570&textsearchtype=exact&sortorder=score%2Cname) or “characterized by highly realistic graphic representation” (see http://dictionary.classic.reference.com/browse/Hyperrealist). In philosophy, hyperreality has been construed as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 2), which “effaces the contradiction between the real and the imaginary” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 71). In hyperreality, “images and signs begin to replace or stand in for reality. … This visual culture, in representing the social world, permits fakes to appear more realistic than reality” (Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner, 2006, p. 187). Both approaches to the hyperreal agree about its spot-on depiction and seeming representations of the “real.” Although hyperreal symbols and forms ring with authenticity and a spirit of “realness,” they typically lack referents, dissolving the lines between fact and fiction. I take from the philosophical approach that the hyperreal is also a way of looking at the very constructedness of media images and signs.

Kenneth Burke (1973) remarked that form and content are inseparable. Yet, Burke left irony's role in symbolic acts untheorized—that is, when form and content are put in tension to create ironic reconstructions and insights. In ironic rhetoric, the means to such an end do not necessarily imply the inseparability of form and content.

Aristotle (1910–1931/2010) wrote “the duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us … to present us with alternative possibilities … all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity” (p. 9–10).

Hariman (2008) looked at an Onion (print edition) headline and noted a “radical contingency: what as given now is shown as something that could be otherwise” (p. 254). Given the sheer iconicity of Onion News Network's videos, I find that this contingency is not completely radical.

Feldman and Goldthwaite-Young (2008) found that people watching comedy programs pay more attention to public affairs than others, using them as complementary resources for political engagement.

As this concept can be hard to understand, Jasinski (2001) used the example of “language” to provide more background on the process of communicative reproduction as both medium and outcome: “Language (as a system) is reproduced every time someone (consciously or unconsciously) employs linguistic rules to produce discourse; the rules are both the medium of situated action (producing a sentence) and the outcome of that action (employing rules revitalizes them and continues their existence, thereby reproducing the system that the rules structure). … [At the same time,] no act can ever be an exact repetition or reproduction of any previous act or any abstract rule. Every utterance contains an element of repetition that is combined with an element of change or modification; it perpetuates and alters the system (or systems) of which it is part” (p. 482). This demonstrates how “social knowledge is employed in, and reproduced (and modified) through, discursive practice” (p. 483).

Leff (1997) suggested that “imitatio is not the mere repetition or mechanistic reproduction of something found in an existing text. It is a complex process that allows historical texts to serve as equipment for future rhetorical production. … Through a process similar to Kenneth Burke's ‘casuistic stretching’, imitation of the structure and language of an old text may help introduce radically new ideas” (pp. 201, 203).

See Goodnight (1982) on the public, private, and technical spheres of argument.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Don J. Waisanen

Don J. Waisanen (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2010) is an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York.