London has confused the Summer Olympics with the Self-Parody Olympics.

[snarp]

That's where you compete to see how many stereotypes about yourself you can fit into a single event. After months of impersonating a George Orwell book, the London Olympics are allegedly planning to launch with a battle between Voldemort and Mary Poppins. I assume that teacups and monocles will be passed out to the crowd, the monocles to be popped at appropriate times, and there'll be a dramatic reading of a Daily Mail editorial exhorting people to think of the children. Then, they top everything off with a member of the royal family saying something racist while wearing a garment that cost 40,000 pounds.

When Kentucky hosted the Self-Parody Olympics, we detained all the Arab athletes at the airport and arrested all the black ones for walking around in an aggressive-looking manner. Every statement anyone involved made to the media was required to include a minimum of one laudatory remark about the coal industry, and a union miner was shot in effigy to kick things off.

Comments

[sara]

When Oregon hosted the Self-Parody Olympics, the opening ceremonies featured dancing trees, salmon, and microbrewed beer. It rained the entire time. All the garbage had to be sorted into recycling and compost bins, and there was no Torch because that would have required burning fossil fuels to light it and you know we're not down with global warming. Oh, and everything was sponsored by Nike.

(Actually, we hosted the U.S. track and field trials here a couple of weeks ago, that's pretty much what it was like. Plus a couple of months of very, very toned runners jogging around town beforehand, which was...scenic, let us just say. Very, very scenic.)

[untonuggan]

Here, here.

(All this to say, you have it spot on.)

[petronia]

I liked how Vancouver did it - the opening ceremonies were straight, the closing ceremonies were self-parody. (Giant beavers, Shatner.)

[ajnabieh]

Every new ridiculous thing, I'm like, seriously, THIS must be the one that's actually a lie, right? RIGHT?