GTA V criticizes American culture with all the elegance of a grumpy pastor watching his first reality show. Missions have you acting as a paparazzo to catch a wholesome actress with a dong up her ass, massacring hallucinations after too much marijuana, and terrorizing immigrants. Most media outlets praise the game for outrageously mocking every aspect of Los Angeles, but it mocks them without any understanding or tact. If you held a gun to the head of the most secluded Eskimo seal farmer and said, "List California stereotypes," you would not be able to distinguish his list from a GTA V Mission FAQ.
"Just six more missions and multiplayer mode, Inuckchuck."
GTA V has such a robotic sense of humor that Jenny McCarthy has linked it to PS3 vaccinations. If a forensic psychologist found a poem on a suicide victim called "WHY EVERYONE IN MY HIGH SCHOOL SUCKS," his summary of that poem would be identical to any gag in Grand Theft Auto V. Each one follows the same two-step structure: Clearly explain what it's mocking, then nothing else. It'd be almost sad if it wasn't so mean-spirited.
A recreation of the GTA V creative process based on actual GTA V scripts.
Satire and parody are more complicated than Scary Movie 11 would have you believe. You need to do more than point at social trends and call a dwarf casting agency. For instance, the GTA V writers explore fertile comedy ground with the idea of women being dumb whores. Any idiot will tell you that ridicule is a hilarious alternative to leering when you're dealing with giant-breasted sluts, but GTA attacks with no wit. And when you mock something without wit, you're just a cranky bully. Grand Theft Auto V's writers read the instructions on a rape kit and decided they knew everything they needed to know about women and comedy.
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