Crafting Hyperreal Spaces for Comic Insights: The Onion News Network's Ironic Iconicity

In 2007, the flagship humor publication, The Onion, launched the Onion News Network (ONN), a comic news organization producing online sketch videos. This article argues that ONN is a distinctive form of hyperreal social critique that uses ironic iconicity, rather than slapstick or the usual tomfoolery of much comedy programming, to invite rhetorical insights about contemporary media events and political practices. ONN's videos draw attention toward communicative dynamics, creating spaces for alternative civic understandings through a televisual technique that imitates but also reconfigures the structure, delivery, or content of mainstream news broadcasts like CNN and Fox News. Although not without limitations, this ironic iconicity crafts a multimodal online rhetoric and demonstrates the contingency, recursivity, and judgment of news communication norms and practices.