AIBU to think that satire should be obvious?

[grubbybrat]

A friend posted a link on facebook to an article on bfnn.co.uk about Peppa Pig being banned in Muslim areas. Looking at the bfnn site, it looks to me like it's a spoof of ultra rightwing sites like Britain First, but it's not entirely clear - it could actually be an ultra rightwing site, peddling stories which are bollocks. In either case the result is the same - friend's link is attarcting loads of comments of the "FGS - uppity muslims, can't they just use the off button?" So whether it's a spoof or not, the effect is exactly the same - it's getting people resentful about Muslims. AIBU to think that if you're going to set up a site like that, it needs to be very obviously funny?

No, that's the whole point of satire isn't it?
Its not meant to he obvious

Um, no, it's not. Look at the Onion - at first you may think it's serious, but then it goes just OTT enough to make it obvious that it's satire and that's when you start questioning your assumptions. And making you question your assumptions is IMHO the point of satire.

And satire does not need to be funny... it is nasty. Holds things/people up for ridicule, it names and it shames.

Just because Private Eye and HIGNFY are funny doesn't mean all satire is... Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, 1984, most of Huxley... very little humour in them!

But satire is supposed to make you think not laugh. I suppose it can do both but the whole purpose is to make people think

And yet there are loads of dopes that take the Onion at face value too.

But I agree about the site you mentioned. If it's just repeated on Facebook as true even though its bollocks, then it just creates division.

Law [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law]]

"Poe's law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is a literary adage which stipulates that without a clear indicator of an author's intended sarcasm it becomes impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism"

YANBU at all. Private Eye and the Onion satirise but are obviously fake. But there are other sites whose intention seems to be to hoax and then claim that it is satire. If it's not primarily intended to hoax, then the "satire" is of an abysmally low standard.

In particular, there's the recent story about Colorado KFC putting marijuana in its burgers that appeared on a site called "The Racket Report" and hoodwinked a lot of people into sharing it as fact - that same website has a story about 2.5 million gallons of tainted milk being pulled from stores, and also - very regrettably - a racist story about McDonald's . As the last story shows, that's not satire. It doesn't make you think. It's just asinine. Absolutely asinine.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03/13/what-was-fake-on-the-internet-this-week-putins-death-hillarys-horns-and-marijuana-at-kfc/

Obvious is a subjective description.

Thanks for that. Would you extend your comment to say that there is no observable difference between the Onion and the Racket Report in terms of the believability of the content?