Thursday, March 24 concluding the satire unit Daily Show - Trevor Noah taking over for Jon Stewart

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Optional....read the insightful article on Trevor Noah and watch a couple of his clips.  Is he a satirist or a comedian?

Or take the time to turn in a missing assignment.  We start the photojournalism unit after the break, and there are only two weeks left in the 3rd quarter.

From the Atlantic Monthly

Missing Jon Stewart

The new Daily Show host, Trevor Noah, is smooth and charming, but he hasn’t found his edge

Evan Agostini / Invision / AP

• 
  
 
 
 
 

• JAMES PARKER
 
•  MARCH 2016 ISSUE
 
•  

It’s a psychic law of the American workplace: By the time you give your notice, you’ve already left. You’ve checked out, and for the days or weeks that remain, a kind of placeholder-you, a you-cipher, will be doing your job. It’s a law that applies equally to dog walkers, accountants, and spoof TV anchormen. Jon Stewart announced that he was quitting The Daily Show in February 2015, but he stuck around until early August, and those last months had a restless, frazzled, long-lingering feel. A smell of ashes was in the air. The host himself suddenly looked quite old: beaky, pique-y, hollow-cheeky. For 16 years he had shaken his bells, jumped and jangled in his little host’s chair, the only man on TV who could caper while sitting behind a desk. Flash back to his first episode as the Daily Showhost, succeeding Craig Kilborn: January 11, 1999, Stewart with floppy, luscious black hair, twitching in a new suit (“I feel like this is my bar mitzvah … I have a rash like you wouldn’t believe.”) while he interviews Michael J. Fox.

    Was he leaving us now? Really? Deserting us just as the gargantuan shadow of the Trump campaign, that neo-fascist bouncy castle, began to rise wobblingly over the country? Kick out the Mexicans. Ban the Muslims. Mock the disabled. Restore America. He’s saying what everybody thinks, we’re told. Indeed he is: Trump isn’t a demagogue; he’s a one-man mob. Now, right now, was when we needed Stewart, our great perforator of mental tyrannies. Who else could pick out the semitones in the hot comic drone of the Donald’s voice? Who else could puncture the ideological bloat? Who else could parse this phenomenon for us as it traveled from a joke to beyond a joke to … ?

  So fine then. Go. Say goodnight, Jon Stewart, and let’s have a look at the new guy. What’s his name? Trevor Noah. Who? Okay, he’s black, a 32-year-old comedian from South Africa, a sharp cultural operator in his own country (apparently) but a sweet naïf in this one. Hell of a gamble, Comedy Central. I salute you. And at first, yes, it was pleasant to see young Trevor smiling away and deeply dimpling in the Stewart seat, the seat that had lately grown gray hairs. He was fresh and he was sleek. The show’s format—the monologue delivered to the camera, then the segments with the correspondents, then the interview—was unchanged, and the writing hadn’t suffered appreciably since the handover. The idea seemed to be that Noah, while coyly advertising his outsider status (“Black Friday—or, as we call it back in Africa, Friday”), would simply and smoothly channel the geist of The Daily Show.

    And he was handling it, bless him, handling the material, distributing rays of easy charm. The Trump gags sounded good in that clipped, musical South African accent, and they even had a new global vibe: Trump as “the perfect African president.” And that little TV blandishment that Stewart could never quite get comfortable with, the “We’ll be right back” at the end of a segment? It tripped off Noah’s tongue. His body language was relaxed; where the old guy had hunched over his desk, with satirical voltage crawling hairily out of his wrist-holes, the kid sat back and rode it. Triumph. Come to my arms, my beaming boy!

Slowly, though, it began to sink in: the dimension of our loss. Jon Stewart was gone—our sanity, our balance. This had of course been the 10‑ton irony of his career: In nuking the news-givers, petarding the pundit class, he became one of them—became, in fact, the pundit/news-giver for a generation of viewers. As far back as 1969, Renata Adler described “that natural creator of discontinuous, lunatic constituencies, the media.” In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky’s Network raised this perception to the level of prophecy, with a rained-on, mad-as-hell Howard Beale heralding the age of the crank with a microphone, the Great Splintering and the end of the singular, authoritative, Cronkitic voice. In 1994, the British showThe Day Today, a fake news program, parodied with surreal brutality the style of the news, the noise of the news, news itself as a production. TV news should have been impossible after The Day Today, but naturally it wasn’t.
    Trevor Noah is good; he’s very good. He’s never in a flap or a dither, and when he wanders (as he occasionally does) into a comedic dead spot, there’s no fear in his eyes. I’m still enjoying the way his taut, spherical head and sunny personality occupy the space left by the raddled Stewart. His impression of sleepy Ben Carson—eyes shut, head back, murmuring in a kind of intellectual narcolepsy—is tremendous. When he and correspondent Hasan Minhaj do a bit on conservative Islamophobia—“White isis,” as they call its adherents, or “wisis”—the fact that both men have brown skin gives the gag, and the anger behind the gag, a planetary resonance.

    It took time, don’t forget, lots of time, for Jon Stewart to build his persona and his audience on The Daily Show—night after night and week after week of showing up and applying himself to events, pulling his faces, delivering his lines. He wasn’t always a heavyweight. Trevor Noah, currently a very able lightweight, needs time too. But he won’t get any. As a culture, we’re not about to nurture this talent, to give it room to grow. Our patience was exhausted long ago, by some other guy. We’re going to pass judgment and move on. There’s a reason Simon Cowell is so rich. Impress us today or get thee hence. So it comes to this: It’s now or never, Trevor.

Donald Trump's Fascist Week

Who's to Blame for the Ku Klux Klan?

Ben Carson and the Black Experience

           Look downward....

Tuesday / Wednesday March 22 / 23 Satirical Magazines Day 2

Updated information: yesterday, some folks could not get onto The Onion. Downtown supposedly had unblocked the site, but there were still those unable to manage its access 9th period.
 However, if you were able to access the site, I asked that you only look at two articles and respond to the questions that follow after reading the background information on The Onion and excerpts from the article by Dan Nosowitz entitled The Look of Funny: How the Onion's art department works.
Questions: 1. What knowledge is needed by the writer to make the satirical article effective?
                    2. What societal issue is being addressed in the article? (textual support)
                    3. What satirical techniques are being employed. (support from video clip or text)

1. parody 2. burlesque 3. exaggeration 4. juxtaposition 5. analogy

6. comparison 7. double entendre

Today- Wednesday- if you completed the assignment, please read Thursday's information on Trevor Noah, who took over from Colbert; then watch the links.  I am not asking for a written response, but would like to consider the observations from The Atlantic Monthly article.

If you have not completed The Onion assignment, use a computer that has access to it. That might mean moving your seat!  These are due at the end of class today.

As I have nothing you must turn in on Thursday, use the time to complete any missing work.  We are done with satire and moving on to photojournalism after the break.   



The Onion

The Onion is an American digital media company and news satire organization that publishes articles on international, national, and local news. Based in Chicago, the company originated as a weekly print publication in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin. In the spring of 1996 The Onion began publishing online. In 2007, the organization began publishing satirical news audio and video online, as theOnion News Network. In 2013, The Onion ceased publishing its print edition and launched Onion Labs, an advertising agency.^[3][4]

The Onion's articles cover current events, both real and fictional, satirizing the tone and format of traditional news organizations with stories, editorials, op-ed pieces, and man-in-the-street interviews using a traditional news website layout and an editorial voice modeled after that of the Associated Press. The publication's humor often depends on presenting mundane, everyday events as newsworthy, surreal or alarming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion).

At The Onion, a fake news website and one of the great satirical outposts of the past 50 years, nearly every image is original: either a graphic created in-house, a photograph taken in-house, or an image so manipulated by Photoshop as to not represent any real event that has ever happened. The tiny graphics team at The Onion pumps out about 50 original pieces of art per week at a time when your average Internet publication arts stories as quickly as possible: with images the subject provided, or photographs from stock agencies and wire services. Nobody sits down and creates original art for a two-sentence post. Yet The Onion does, over and over again. Why bother?

As Stephen Colbert or any great satirist will tell you, a key to satire is to always stay in character. In The Onion’s case, that "character" is an absurd, alternative world invented to comment on the real one. Every aspect of the fake world has to ring true for the trick to work. That includes the visuals. When nothing you publish is real, every single image has to be made from scratch. "We want to make sure that we're making our Onion-world fully realized and very real," says Ben Berkley, managing editor of The Onion. It's all in service of the joke.

A Real (Fake) History 
There is a real history of The Onion—started by two college students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988, eventually moved to New York and then, recently, back west to Chicago—but there’s also a fake history created by the writers of The Onion itself. In this history, The Onion was founded by a German immigrant named Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel ("zwiebel" is German for "onion") in 1765, named the "Mercantile Onion" because, according to The Onion book "Our Dumb Century," those were the only two English words Zweibel knew. Also in the fictional history of The Onion: The Onion News Network, ONN, was founded several years before television itself was invented; the grandson of the founder, editor T. Herman Zweibel, a conservative firebrand who once opposed television characters sleeping in the same bed, eventually left the planet Earth; and in the span of a week in 2009, The Onion was sold to a Chinese conglomerate Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation and subsequently sold by the same Chinese conglomerate.

That skewed, surreal tone permeates The Onion’s strange editorial approach—a combination of fake New York Times and fake cheeseball local paper—along with a few other publications taking on other media types. Notably, that includes the new site Clickhole, a parody of pageview-desperate posts on sites ranging fromBuzzFeed to the Huffington Post to Upworthy. (Clickhole has its own photo editor, and the teams for The Onion’s videos are separate. Even more separate is the AV Club, a non-satirical criticism and reviews site, formerly a section within the physical Onion newspaper, that discusses movies, TV, books, games, and music.)

    What The Onion does is more difficult than it seems; just look at less successful copycats, like the Daily Currant, to see what a high-wire act satirical journalism is. But The Onion is doing more than just writing fake news; with just a handful of writers and a three-person art department, it has managed to create what television and movies often fail to do: a fully-functioning, fascinating world just different enough from our own to serve as a damning critique of it.

Monday March 21 satirical news magazines Day 1

Learning Targets: 

1. I can analyze a case in which grasping point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement).

2. I can cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

3. I can analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument.

4. I can determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power and persuasiveness of the text.

5. I can write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately.

6. I can present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective.

7. I can determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases.

Essential question: 

quis custodiet ipsos  

...Who watches the watchers?

The motto above and the essential question is a quote 

from Juvenal's Satire VI.   This  is a 

a tongue-in-cheek reference to both The Daily Currant's 

mission to hold the powerful to account and its satirical 

nature.

As a review and summation, the overall purpose of satire is 

usually to make some kind of moral or political change in 

society through the use of critical humor. A satirist will 

choose a subject or person with whom he or she finds fault

 and use humor to make those faults obvious. In theory, 

many satirists hope the humor will have a corrective effect, 

almost like a punishment for bad behavior, ultimately 

leading people to change the way they behave.

The Daily Currant is an English language online satirical newspaper that covers global politics, business, technology, entertainment, science, health and media. It is accessible from over 190 countries worldwide - now including South Sudan.

"[Their] mission is to ridicule the timid ignorance which obstructs our progress, and promote intelligence - which presses forward."

The Onion '​s articles comment on current events, both real and fictional. It parodies traditional news websites with stories, editorials,op-ed pieces, and man-in-the-street interviews, using a traditional news website layout and an editorial voice modeled after that of the Associated Press. 

Its humor often depends on presenting mundane, everyday 

events as newsworthy, surreal or alarming.

In class: 

1.We are finishing up the satire 

unit by looking at two on-line satirical 

magazines: The Daily Currant and The 

Onion.

 2. First: open a word document.

      Read and discuss with a partner, if you wish, 

 the following  two current news magazine examples 

from The Daily Currant.

Please respond to the following questions in 

complete sentences, with supporting textual 

evidence.

1. What does the author assume about the attitudes of the audience in the piece? (How do you know this? Particular words or phrases?)

2. What aspect of society is the author satirizing? (evidence?)

3. What is the goal or purpose of the satire? (consider if this is laudable?)

4. What methods/techniques does the author employ to create the satire? (these should be very familiar: 

1. parody

2. burlesque

3. exaggeration

4. juxtaposition

5. analogy

6. comparison

7. double entendre

5. How effective are the author’s methods? (prior knowledge?)

class articles from The Daily Currant

Article 1

Politics

Donald Trump In Critical Condition After Choking on Own Bullshit

Feb 29, 2016

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is in critical condition tonight after choking on his own bullshit during a speech in Texas.

The billionaire real-estate developer was giving a speech in front of 20,000 supporters at the William T. Anderson memorial coliseum ahead of the state’s primary on Super Tuesday.

When he reached the part of his stump speech where he promises the crowd that Mexico will pay for a border wall - the bullshit spewing from his mouth fell back into his throat, pinched off his trachea and obstructed his breathing.

Trump collapsed on the stage and was rushed to Johnson Medical Center where doctors performed an emergency stercoronomy.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I’ve never seen this amount of bullshit,” says Dr. Jack Shepard, who performed the operation. "We've pumped 17 pounds of bullshit out his throat and the machine is still running." 

Trump has led the Republican polls since joining the race last fall, and has won three out of the four primary contests thus far.

Doctors say Trump is expected to make a full recovery, and will be back on the campaign trail spewing bullshit in no time.

Article 2

Sport

Sarah Palin: ‘Why Does NAACP Tournament Have White Players?’

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Sarah Palin appeared on Fox Sportstoday and openly wondered why the NAACP allows white players to participate in its college basketball tournament.

Palin made the appearance on the Mike and John show this morning to promote her new book about how the liberal media is destroying sportscasting. Attempting to make conversation, the hosts asked what has surprised her most in the ongoing March Madness championship.

“The biggest surprise is how many white guys I see playing in this tournament” she responded,”I thought the NAACP was supposed to be about black people.

“I mean I guess most of them are black. But that one guy from Wichita State is white. And half is Wisconsin's team is white. So I just don’t get it. Why is it sponsored by a black organization, if it’s not for black people?”

Palin apparently confused the NAACP, a national civil rights organization, with the NCAA, which organizes collegiate sporting events.

Palin served as governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009, and was the Republican Party’s candidate for Vice-President in 2008. She briefly worked as a sportscaster in the late 1980’s.