The Onion Strikes Comic Gold With Biden Spoofs

This photo illustration is NOT the vice president washing his car in the White House driveway, but rather a doctored image from the fevered imagination of the satirical journal The Onion.

By JEREMY W. PETERS
NYT

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has never smashed a Whac-A-Mole game in a drunken fit. He has never invoked Freedom of Information laws to find out a female federal employee’s work schedule. And to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he has never washed his car in the White House driveway.

But to readers of The Onion, the satirical newspaper and Web site, the vice president has done all of those things, plus bounce a check for $39.50 to a liquor store and star in advertisements for Hennessy cognac that emphasize his international playboy swagger.

Political satire typically seizes on a public official’s foibles or flaws and exaggerates them — Gerald R. Ford’s clumsiness, Bill Clinton’s fast-food cravings, George W. Bush’s malapropisms, for example. Turning the craft on its head, writers at The Onion have created a caricature of the vice president that is entirely incongruous with his public image. Of all Mr. Biden’s imperfections, being a womanizer and a drunk are not on the list. In fact, he does not drink and has been, by all accounts, a devoted husband and family man for more than 30 years.

The Onion’s portrayals of Mr. Biden began as traditional vice president jokes (“Biden Pardons Single Yam in Vice-Presidential Thanksgiving Ritual”) but writers there had an epiphany last year when they discovered that tweaking their caricature of the vice president into someone virtually unrecognizable from his public persona — “Biden To Cool His Heels in Mexico For a While,” read one headline — was comic gold.

(More here.)