Christine Wenc > Quotes

“Some, however, might argue that saying satire failed because it didn’t change anything is misunderstanding the purpose of satire, which is to make us laugh, and then think about what we just laughed at.”
― Christine Wenc, Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire

“The approach also encompassed more abstract things like the temporal reality the story existed in. Thompson gave an example of a writer wanting to do a piece about passing a law in Congress. “There’s this tendency, if you’re a comedy writer, to write about it being proposed, it being debated, it being passed, it being implemented, and it having had a certain effect, and the temptation is to have all five of those things take place in a single news story that is running on one specific day.” Except that in real life, that’s not how it happens. Those things would happen on many days. So, if the goal was to parody a daily newspaper, the story would need to be about only one of those things—the “event” that modern news always reports on as an answer to the emblematic “What happened?” question.”
― Christine Wenc, Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire