Kony 2012 is a Parody

A number of comedy videos lampooning Kony 2012 are making the rounds on social media. Some are funny, some are asinine.

A screen grab from Tony 2012 (via Youtube).

Kony 2012, the failed hashtag movement to make Joseph Kony “famous,” is no joke. Millions of people still send money to Invisible Children and one of its first public critics, a Canadian student who runs a tumblr blog called Visible Children, has received death threats. At the same time, it hasn’t stopped the comedy and parodies.

Here’s a few floating around in our inboxes, or passed around on Facebook and Twitter.

First up is “Tony 2012: Stop the Tiger,” by a comedy group, who seem to specialize in frat boy humor. Of course they have merchandise. It is funny in bits. (It features the tiger cartoon from Kellog’s Frosted Flakes selling weed.

Then another comedian made a “response video” to the Tony 2020 comedy video because it is not Youtube if someone does not make a response video. It is meta.

The Australian “rap news agency” Juice Rap News, made one of those “sing the news” videos. They have good politics too. Watch.

Finally, since Invisible Children compared Joseph Kony to Adolf Hitler, you knew someone was going to remix that “Downfall” scene where Hitler berates his commanders for not following his order. Instead the person who made the “Hitler reacts to Kony 2012” is a supporter of Kony 2012 calling it “awe inspiring.” It is all over the place, has bad politics. and downplays some of the crimes of  the Nazis. If you still want to see it. It is here.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.