Patterico's Pontifications

3/28/2006

The Onion Does Joel Stein

Filed under: Buffoons,Dog Trainer,Morons — Patterico @ 10:10 pm



You really should head over to The Onion. They have this brilliant guy there mocking the L.A. Times‘s hyper-vapid and buffoonish columnist Joel Stein. The writer captures Stein’s unbelievable self-absorption perfectly, in a parody column titled 500,000 people, and no one called me? (At the Onion, they write the titles first and the article second.) Here’s how it opens:

NONE OF YOU thought of calling? I mean, I could see if it was a small dinner party: You thought I wouldn’t mesh well; you already had a smugly self-obsessed, attention-needy columnist, maybe Mickey Kaus — I get it. But there were 500,000 of you at Saturday’s pro-immigration rally downtown, more than 13% of the city’s population, the largest gathering ever in L.A. This was a snub.

Did you think I didn’t own a white T-shirt to symbolize peace? Because I do. And I adore immigrants.

My great-grandparents were immigrants. And I’m pretty sure the guy who waters our plants is, though I don’t talk to him much because he only speaks Spanish.

And it goes on like that. Hilarious. This guy is a genius. He totally has Stein pegged.

UPDATE: I’m told this is really Joel Stein’s actual column. Sorry for any confusion.

14 Responses to “The Onion Does Joel Stein”

  1. Hyper-vapid and buffonish to be sure, but, man oh man, he shows an incredible amount of self-awareness: “When I have kids and send them to private school in L.A., they’re destined to become worthless drug addicts who drop out of Skidmore and occasionally put up art shows downtown.”

    JVW (d667c9)

  2. I sat in a restaurant on Devonshire Blvd. in Chatsworth and gazed out the window at a march of a hundred or so little children (7th grade tops) “marching” along the sidewalk waving a few Mexican flags and one or two Mexican flat colored cardboard signs. They were backed up by white teachers in the back of the line while three police cruisers slowly crept along beside them so the little shits wouldn’t get hurt. This “protest” was organized by the usual suspects (teachers unions, some labor union locals, and the hard Left) and they did a very good job of mostly fooling everyone. The media was not fooled, they were a large part of the organizing of the “march.”

    Howard Veit (9b02ac)

  3. Are you saying that Stein is a parody of himself? It seems to me that he’s impressed with his “wittiness” and that he thinks he’s too smart by about half.

    Buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth and you could be into real money.

    Harry Arthur (40c0a6)

  4. You really should see Mystic River. It has this brilliant guy there mocking the hyper-vapid and buffoonish actor Sean Penn.
    You really should listen to Love and Theft. It has this brilliant guy there mocking the hyper-vapid and buffoonish songwriter Bob Dylan.
    You really should read The Constant Gardner. It has this brilliant guy there mocking the hyper-vapid and buffoonish novelist John LeCarre.
    You really should watch Saturday Night Live. They have this brilliant guy there mocking the hyper-vapid and buffoonish Alec Baldwin.

    Doh. Sorry for the confusion.

    [I take it then that you didn’t get the joke? I suppose I’ll have to explain it to you. Hint: the “update” was posted at the same time as the original post. It’s an old Jeff Goldstein trick. — Patterico]

    Asinistra (c493b3)

  5. Sorry, I didn’t get the joke. I don’t read the LA Times. If I didn’t visit here occasionally I wouldn’t know who Joel Stein was. I wouldn’t know how lax they are in updating the corections in their archives. I wouldn’t know what mornings they dropped the paper off late at Casa de Patterico.

    I also wouldn’t know that the LA police are wasting good taxpayer money making sure “little shits” don’t get hurt while exercising their constitutional right to peaceably assemble and ruining Howard Veit’s huevos rancheros.

    I’ll try to check in more often so as not to be so hopelessly clueless.

    Asinistra (c493b3)

  6. Two observations: Joel Stein’s greatgrandparents would have recognized what “schmuck” means–and would be sad that little Joelly has become one.

    And as for “little shits”–I never knew a school kid (“little shit” or otherwise) that wouldn’t be delighted by taking a day off for a protest march–whether they knew what was going on or not. I assume that, since it was raining cats and dogs in Los Angeles yesterday that the number of “protest marchers” was down, but since the sun is out today, the number of protest marchers will be up. Beats the hell out of studying English in a dull classroom.

    Mike Myers (3a4363)

  7. Gee Asinistra, you admit that you don’t read the LA Times, but you are very sure that all the students are doing is “exercising their Constitutional right to peaceably assemble.” Would it trouble you to learn that the students attempted to march up a freeway ramp and onto a freeway? Would it bother you that these school walkouts are going to cost the LA Unified School District an estimated $1 million dollars in funding that they won’t receive because of the day’s absenteeism? Would it anger you to learn that some of the “peaceful” protesters threw water bottles and fruit at the police? Your contributions to this debate would be a whole lot more welcome if you would bother to read up on the reporting. Here is a helpful link.

    JVW (d667c9)

  8. My daughter teaches third grade and said all of a sudden there was noise outside the classroom window and she walked over to see a bunch of protesters walking by the school. It was very unexpected.

    Well the kids also went to the windows to look out and pronounced, “It’s the Mexicans.”

    Oddly, just about everyone of her students are in fact Mexican.

    PC14 (98b75e)

  9. For more along this vein, see: The Onion does the Persecuted Christian Majority.

    UPDATE: …or do they?

    Tom (f35e9a)

  10. Valid criticism, Tom.

    Some of my evangelical friends need to lighten up some. To suggest that the secularization of some holidays that used to have predominantly Christian themes or were originally of Christian origin is in any way related to “persecution”, is just, well, … for lack of a better term, dumb.

    Harry Arthur (40c0a6)

  11. For more along this vein, see:The Onion does the Persecuted Hollywood Erotic Film Maker Minority.

    UPDATE: …or do they?

    Sorry, Tom and Pat, I saw this on Dana’s site and I couldn’t resist the temptation. Remember: immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

    Paul Verhoeven, director of the first “Basic Instinct” (which scored $353 million worldwide) as well as the widely ridiculed “Showgirls” (now regarded as something of a camp classic), attributes the genre’s demise to the current American political climate.

    “Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States,” said the Dutch native. “Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends.”

    Scribe Nicholas Meyer, who was an uncredited writer on 1987’s seminal sex-fueled cautionary tale “Fatal Attraction,” agrees, noting that the genre’s downfall coincides with the ascent of the conservative political movement.

    “We’re in a big puritanical mode,” he said. “Now, it’s like the McCarthy era, except it’s not ‘Are you a communist?’ but ‘Have you ever put sex in a movie?'”

    Wow! Don’t know what planet these guys have been living on but a poor response in the marketplace to a lousy movie (fair disclosure: I only know this third hand) is evidence of the action of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?

    Puritanical mode? I’m wondering how an allegedly intelligent person could come to that conclusion. Have we ever had more sex in our public lives than now? Sex is pervasive throughout the culture by any measure.

    Harry Arthur (40c0a6)

  12. Stein does seem to be the type who enjoys the smell of his own farts but his piece on how schools in the U.S. suck compared to those in Europe was sobering.

    /shameless self-promotion OFF

    Smitster (ae580c)

  13. I don’t know if it’s just me but I liked that column. His writing style has character and personality. Something that most writes lack. He’s not afraid to embarass himself for our amusement. And he’s not a wuss, because he’s not afraid to offend either. I respect that.

    Elizabeth (a90377)


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