My Brother Is Going To Love This Forwarded List Of Lawyer Jokes by Steve Schwantes (TOW #16 Written)

My Brother Is Going To Love This Forwarded List Of Lawyer Jokes by Steve Schwantes is another in a long list of Onion articles that point out the real issues. Everyone has that one person that just will not stop sending you pointless emails that you're going to delete automatically, or even better, have set to spam. For me, it's my dad, who sends endless emails about how millennials are lazy and how I should have my major picked out by now. Jokes on you dad, this millennial knows how to delete emails in two easy clicks! And then they'll ask you about it later and you'll be all “yes, that was very helpful, what would I do without your life changing emails?” But enough with the passive-aggressiveness, let's analyze the rhetoric in this passage!

The first part of this article is a picture of the author, a balding, white, middle aged man. It is very obviously meant to represent the majority of people who send the annoying emails you delete. Next is the satire, which is quite obviously there because the Onion is a satire website. While at first look, to a very gullible four-year-old this may look like a genuine man talking about genuine things, everyone else will be able to know that they are using satire to point out a very annoying #firstworldproblems. The article uses a first-person point of view to show how ridiculous it actually is. For example, “When you forward a mass-forwarded email, you get a good feeling inside”. Not to mention that everyone stopped mass-forwarding jokes in like, 6^th grade. Middle aged people, am I right? It paints them as excited puppies who understand nothing and have just found out what the internet is. Wow, gmail, what a revolutionary concept, am I right?

Visual Text -TOW #15

This political cartoon depicts a huge crowd of people rallying with a banner that has “save the twinkie” on it. Meanwhile, two people, one holding a sign that says “save the earth” look on to the crowd, and the man wearing blue jeans part of the twosome says, “we're doomed”. It is a critique of the causes people choose to rally around. Also noted should be the fact that the people holding the save the twinkie sign are seemingly overweight, or close to it. They are also white and middle aged. Then, the people holding the save the earth sign are younger, thin, and looking on with disapproving faces. The people holding the sign save the twinkie are aggressive in their manner, not even taking notice of the save the earth people. This points out the fact that many of the people rallying around twinkies would not even take a second glance at save the earth posters, or the whole cause in general.

The author of this piece is trying to say that people rally for dumb causes much of the time bypassing more important ones, like saving the earth. One example of this is the potato salad guy, who on kickstarter, raised a couple hundred thousand bucks just to make a potato salad. While these people could have been giving to worthwhile charities, they instead chose to help someone make a 1 dollar potato salad. His cause was dumb, but people still gave to it, thinking it was funny. The author is pointing out the shallowness in society, and how we get numb to causes that are important but seemingly overexposed. This is what sucks in society because we need to learn more to not overlook things we have seen before, like save the earth posters.