Donovan McNabb: 'I'd Like To Thank The Ungrateful, Over-Expecting,Oftentimes-Racist Fans Of Philadelphia'

I don’t understand this, and what is the Onion? Whatever, it is not right or fair or ethical to put words into somebody’s mouth, unless the words are so ridiculous that it is obvious that it is a joke.

Is fake news. They do parodies of popular news and events, as well as just pure made up stuff in general. Very funny stuff. The Onion is OBVIOUSLY a satire website, so it is not a them being mean, it is all in good fun.

I knew it was satire, but very unfunny satire. SNL is sometimes funny, as is Mad, National Lampoon, etc. Parodies usually parody something – take some statement or policy position and take it to some extreme, exaggerate it, which is what can make it funny. So if some player blasted the fans of his old team (which just happened recently with Denver, and wouldn’t be that surprising for the notoriously brutal Philadelphia fans), saying (e.g.) that they are nasty, a comedian might have him or her ranting and raving that they were a bunch of racist, redneck retards. It’s often the ludicrous nature of the presumed conduct that makes it funny. Reading the title and then body of this post, one might assume that McNabb had criticized Philadelphia fans, and the blurb here just exaggerated his comments. In actual fact, McNabb did not criticize Philadelphia at all, specifically declining to do so. So it gave a misleading impression of what DM said, so was a sort of lie, besides being dumb and unfunny. In other parodies, good ones are funny and fair because it’s clear that they are not true. If they give an untrue impression of reality, amounting to a lie, they are objectionable. One method is embedding the lie as as assumption underlying the real joke. For example, if you want to kid Dick Cheney, who supported invading Iraq, by joking that he now wanted to invade Canada, that would be funny because it’s so outlandish. But if in the body of the joke you quoted him (falsely) as advocating invading lebanon and Syria, that would be sort of sleazy because some might actually believe that he advocated that. The McNabb post was offensive and not funny, but also gave the false impression that he had criticized Eagle fans. Also, some of the language was a little extreme, but most of it was not really that ridiculous – quite possible for a guy who’s maybe a little drunk, starts out and gets carried away. I read far worse stuff right on HH recently – including the cancer remark. So I think it was a really stupid post, not funny, and unfair to a pretty good guy. On SNL, I think they used to have some good people, went downhill with the departure of Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, etc, and have actually been coming back a bit this year – some funny people. IMO, Darrell Hammond is the funniest (Sean Connery, Jack Perkins, many others). You all might study “humor” sometime – it’s hard to be funny!

Right, I got a little carried away, philosophizing. I did realize it was a joke right from the start, but a pointless and unfunny one. Rob and Pirate – yes DM is a very classy guy – one of the reasons I thought the post was a little out of line. Discussing it was and is a waste of our valuable time.