I discovered The Onion in the early 1990s and fondly remember nearly passing out with laughter once a week when each new issue came out. The headlines and articles were absolutely brilliant:
Amish give up; “This is bullshit,” say elders
Jewish stock car booed off track (accompanied by pic of NASCAR with a huge Star of David painted on the hood)
Deviant Kellogg’s worker comes in specially marked boxes
Their first issue after 9/11 was a masterpiece; they found a way to acknowledge everyone’s bewilderment over the surreal scale of the attack and the astonishing evil of the hijackers - and somehow managed to mine some much-needed laughter out of it.
These days I visit their website every week, but the material doesn’t seem as inspired as it did about 15-20 years ago. Is this a case of me slowly turning into a crotchety old man, or do other folks also find them to not be as funny as they once were?
I haven’t read them lately but at first I thought you were giving examples of current, bad headlines, until I saw the last, laugh-out-loud, one. The first looks run of the mill for The Onion and the second is okay if bizarre. Although if they were all as uninspired as the first example I could see how you could think that it’s gone downhill.
I came in here to talk about their 9/11 issue. The header was a satellite picture of the US with crosshairs superimposed on it, and the title “Holy Fucking Shit”. It was such a relief to see something so candid and un-purple that I fell off my chair laughing.
However: I think the Onion is still sometimes pretty darn funny. The current issue has a headline that reads “Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.” I read that aloud to my husband last night. Pretty spot-on, you know?
Been reading them since the mid-nineties, and they’ve always reminded me of Saturday Night Live in their ability to take a good premise and stretch it out way too long with the same formulaic mined jokes. Except The Onion generally starts with a much stronger premise, IMO. The headlines are the best part.
My favorite, and one I think about every autumn, was something like “Cosmo Presents: Fattening Up For Winter”
I don’t go to the Onion as often as I used to. Well, when I used to read the Onion, it was in its paper form, really. But every time I do remember to check it out, it still seems as funny as it’s always been.
Citizens of Grzny and Sjlbvdnzv eagerly await the arrival of the vowels. “My God, I do not think we can last another day,” Trszg Grzdnjkln, 44, said. “I have six children and none of them has a name that is understandable to me or to anyone else. Mr. Clinton, please send my poor, wretched family just one ‘E.’ Please.”
The Onion also used to be published weekly (paper and online). They seemed to have more time to fine tune their articles. Now they are pushing new stuff up daily.
The Onion is still funny, but it often feels very lazy. It seems like half the stories are always some variant of “Area Man is Pathetic For some Reason”, which are always pretty much the same, kinda hacky thing. In my opinion, the best fake news stories are those that, if real, would actually be publishable. The stories posted into this thread so far all pretty much follow that trend, they’re ridiculous but (fake-)newsworthy. “Area Man Eats Sandwich at Subway” stories are not.
The Onion was far and away the funniest the first time I happened onto the online website and didn’t really know if it was for real or for laughs. Once I knew for sure that it’s for laughs, it stopped being so funny, but it’s good to hear that it’s still around.
One is that you only remember the very best headlines from a long time ago and you start to compare the handful of truly brilliant articles to the day to day recent articles. As a test, I used the onion search engine to pull a random assortment of articles from 2004. Unscientifically, it seems like roughly the mix of ok to great I see today. Of the 20 articles on the page, I chuckled at about 2 of them. You can alter the page value in the URL to see other dates (there’s a bug in the search engine where clicking on the links break it).
Second, the Onion is simply pumping out way more material these days. From playing around with the search engine, it seems like there were a total of ~6000 articles published between 1995 - 2004, ~30000 articles between 2005 - 2014. That’s not counting the various spinoffs like the Onion News Network, The AV Club and Clickhole. The Onion is easily pumping out an order of magnitude more content today than it was 10 years ago and it’s hard to keep quality the same when there’s so much more space to fill.
Third, I think people’s tastes evolve. When you first discover The Onion, it was like nothing you’d ever seen before and everything was fresh and new. Now, you’ve lived with it for over 10 years and all of the tricks are old hat. Still, I think stuff like Government Admits It Was Only Behind Destruction Of North Tower is among some of the best work The Onion has done.
I attended UW-Milwaukee 89-93. They distributed it pretty liberally around campus from the beginning. We didn’t know much about it’s sources besides “It’s from Madison”. I’m suprised that quality has remained so consistent over the years (even though the tv show was a dud). The headlines have always been hit & miss (mostly hit), but you read enough of them and they start to become almost predictable.
The saddest one was when they had a headline that said, “Nation Celebrating Entire Week Without Shooting.” But then there was a shooting. So they added “never mind.”
