Wait, Why Can't We Eat Other People Again?

In the spirit of this week's A Modest Proposal, I've decided to analyze another piece of satirical writing, this time from the notorious "news source," The Onion. The article, entitled "Wait, Why Can't We Eat Other People Again?" makes an argument similar to Jonathon Swift's: we should eat children for dinner. The only difference is the reasoning for the claim. However, the major similarity is clearly an allusion to A Modest Proposal, which is part of what makes it humorous.

Technically, my earlier description of the article was incorrect. The article is not satirical, because it does not aim to make the audience think critically about the subject, but rather just to make the audience laugh. A Modest Proposal was discussing the famine and poverty in Ireland, and criticizing the government for not helping the starving population. This article simply argues that we should eat people because there isn't any reason not to. In fact, Doug Brusey questions or societal "rules," "Hey, what if that’s it? What if the one guy in history that tried to eat another person cooked it all wrong and it came out weird and chewy? Wouldn’t that be a dumb reason to not eat people?"

This irony is the main source of humor in the passage. As a test of the audience's logic, the irony asks the audience to fully understand that Brusey is not in fact a psychopathic cannibal, (especially in the closing line, "Either way, I actually just ate a family of three, and, if I can be honest, they were a little gamey"). Once they understand this, they can laugh at the comparison of babies to animals raised for slaughter and jokingly agree with Brusey's point of view.

The peice was clearly not nearly as effective as A Modest Proposal, but its allusions to the famous piece ("Now, in fairness, I’m pretty sure it’s okay to eat a human child if you want") and its ironic message were both humorous because they relied on the cultural memory and overall competence of the audience to grasp the joke. And if the purpose of the article was to merely make the audience chuckle, (which is actually quite simplistic for typical The Onion commentaries) then the article was indeed effective.