Too Stupid for Satire: How The Media Branded Me as a Racist
(guy posted hilariously racist australia day video)
My first thought, before the coffee hit my brain and I remembered the date, was that my hard work had all finally paid off. 2011 was already shaping up to be a good year. Some book that I contributed to was sitting on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, I was in the media. Happily, I checked in with the Herald Sun to see what the papers were writing about me, already thinking about what price I should demand for my movie deal.
"Anger at bad-taste ocker web clip: A surf shop is under fire for labeling an Australia Day video urging Aussies to beat up and glass homosexuals and foreigners as 'hilarious.' "
"Straya Day" had gone viral again. The video was suddenly up to almost 300,000 views. Someone had complained to the media (but more on that later) and at least one paper was going to pick up this ball and run with it. Of course the worst part is, they weren't simply disagreeing with the way I portrayed the nation. I could deal with it if they thought my satire was simply too biting. Instead, they didn't actually detect any satire.
I was aiming for "so ridiculously racist that nobody could take it literally," but what the Herald Sun saw was "so ridiculously racist, this guy is literally worse than Hitler." Just like that New Yorker cover, there was no way to take the joke to such an extreme that everyone would see it.
