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YMMV / Private Eye

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  • Accidental Innuendo: Sometimes seen in Colemanballs / Commentatorballs, and they also occasionally publish examples of this from newspaper articles (this used to be a much more prevalent feature, back when manual typesetting meant that amusing typos were more common in newspapers).
  • Broken Base: Their treatment of Julian Assange is unrelentingly negative - as far as the Eye is concerned, he is a shifty, anti-Semitic, irresponsible, vain sex offender. This has fractured the base into people who agree with this treatment and people who think that the Eye and Assange are natural allies.
  • Life Imitates Art: Following the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne in 2000, the News of the World ran a name and shame campaign against alleged paedophiles. An Eye cartoon showed a hate mob chasing a paediatrician, mistaking him for a paedophile. Whilst the issue was on sale, a paediatrician in South Wales had her house vandalised by people who had taken her job title to mean she was a paedophile.
  • Memetic Mutation: The Eye's nicknames for newspapers are regularly used by people who have never read and have barely heard of Private Eye. For a more narrow, political audience, their euphemisms such as "tired and emotional" (meaning, drunk) and "discussing Ugandan affairs" (anything sex-related) are well known.

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