Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
An entirely plastic figure with no obvious genitalia and a blank expression who lives in a fabricated world … but enough about Donald Trump, let’s talk about Barbie.
Anything as popular as the Barbie movie has to get political, and that is what’s happened. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted that his family had chosen “Barbie” ahead of the other big cinema release, “Oppenheimer.” To be fair, Sunak has young daughters and the codes to actual nuclear weapons, so it was always likely to be “Barbie” that he chose to see first.
Hopefully, Sunak’s children haven’t seen the posters that have been popping up in London that cast senior members of the Conservative Party as characters in the Barbie film alongside attacks on their positions on immigration and a variation on the hashtag “ThisBarbieIs…” that ends with a word beginning with C that isn’t exactly wholesome or suitable for a family publication (if indeed this is a family publication).
Not everyone is as pro-“Barbie” as Sunak. Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, announced that he wouldn’t be going to see the movie, without specifying why. Germany was of course home to the Lilli doll, believed to be the inspiration for Barbie but which was a bigger, more curvaceous version of the American product and which originated on the pages of Bild (the bigger, more curvaceous version of this publication).
Also unhappy at “Barbie” was an American right-wing commentator, the permanently furious Ben Shapiro, who posted a 43-minute-long video (the film itself is only 113 minutes!) complaining about it.
“My producers dragged me to see ‘Barbie’ and it was one of the most woke movies I have ever seen,” Shapiro said, before adding: “Let me begin with my generalized assessment of the movie. This movie is not just a piece of shit. This movie is a flaming piece of dogshit, piled atop an entire dumpster on fire, piled atop a landfill filled with dogshit.”
Shapiro — who, lest you forget, is an actual adult — also threw a Barbie doll into a bin on top of some other Barbie dolls and set them on fire.
It was perhaps the oddest meltdown by someone from the American right since Tucker Carlson devoted an entire section of his TV show to complaining that M&Ms had gone woke and redesigned the cartoons used to advertise the candy to be “less sexy,” with the Green M&M swapping her boots for sneakers. That of course prompted the sadly unanswered question: “Does Tucker Carlson fancy multicolored button-shaped chocolate?”
CAPTION COMPETITION
“The ‘Star Wars’ franchise finally runs out of steam and budget.”
Can you do better? Email [email protected] or on Twitter @pdallisonesque
Last time we gave you this photo:
Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.
“There she goes! That should make American economists think twice before trying to steal our jobs,” by Tom Morgan
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.
