ABBOTSFORD, BC
After hundreds of people called a fictional woman in a satirical article “stupid” for mortgaging her house to buy Taylor Swift tickets, satirist Andrew Unger decided to see if the same reaction would follow the news of a fictional Abbotsford man in a similar situation.
“Some folks still have trouble detecting satire,” said Unger. “It’s pretty ironic that these are the very same people calling other folks ‘stupid.’ It doesn’t help that they’re usually just reading the headline.”
Unger says it will be interesting to see if angry borderline illiterate folks on the Internet judge a man who pays a lot of money for a concert the same way they judge a woman who does the same.
“We’ll just post this article and see what happens,” said Unger. “Should be interesting. Get out your popcorn.”
At press time, local man Phil Berg had received full approval from the credit union to use the equity on his Abbotsford mansion to buy two nosebleed seats for the upcoming Springsteen show in Vancouver. Unger predicts people on Facebook will tell this man to get his priorities straight and a few of them might even comment, without any sense of irony, that there’s a “sucker born every minute.”
“Or maybe not. We’ll see if the atmosphere in the comment section will be as over-the-top and vitriolic as it was with the Taylor Swift article,” said Unger. “Have a look at the comments yourself and draw your own conclusions.”
Fictional character Phil Berg says he really doesn’t like all the attention he and his wife Megan are getting for their extravagant purchases and wishes the public would go back to arguing about Barbie vs. Oppenheimer again.
(Springsteen photo credit: Takahiro Kyono/CC)
