When The Onion's CEO Steve Hannah publicly apologized last week for the satirical newspaper's controversial Oscar-night tweet about Quvenzhan� Wallis, two thoughts crossed my mind: 1) It's not a good day for comedy when a satirical publication says it's sorry for a joke that was not actually about the Beasts of the Southern Wild�actress. And 2) what would Paul Provenza make of this?
In addition to being a veteran stand-up comic and actor, Provenza directed The Aristocrats,�one of the finest dissections of comedy in any media (and not because I'm in it). The 2005 documentary deconstructs one of the oldest and dirtiest jokes in stand-up ? the film's title is its punchline ? and when I shot my segment with Provenza, I quickly learned that, in addition to being a very funny guy, he's a scholar of humor, who's really good at explaining why something is funny ? or not.
'The Onion': The Quvenzhan� Wallis Controversy
So, in the aftermath of the Wallis controversy, I emailed Provenza to get his analysis of the situation. Excerpts of his assessment appear below, but, first, an unexpurgated recap of what happened last week for anyone who was focusing on the sequestration crisis instead. If you're offended by the word "cunt," then stop reading now, because the term appears quite a bit in the following passages, and, in the context of this discussion, I think it's justified. Also, as Provenza noted, censoring the word, "just adds to the irony" of the controversy.
Here's what The Onion�initially tweeted during the Academy Awards on Feb. 24. �After initially obscuring the offending word, the tweet was eventually disappeared as the backlash grew:
"Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhan� Wallis is kind of a…
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