My favorites are a number of the ones in Our Dumb Century. It’s hard to pick just one. “HOLY SHIT! Man walks on fucking moon!” was pretty classic, as was “AWESOME! Nation wowed by Hindenburg explosion.” Then there’s the story of the first white man to play in the Negro league, as well as the piece about Germany quelling the great Polish menace in Europe (along with a graphic depicting Poland as a rising spectre terrorizing the continent.) “Area Bassist Fellated” always gave me chuckles, as well as the Sting commentary You Know, I Used to Be Kind of Cool, Once."
So many to choose from. And many, many more I am forgetting.
The best article The Onion ever wrote was the Russians Still Trying to Kill Rasputin. For a good week or so after I read it a friend of mine would only have to mention “icebreaking ship” to make me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Yeah, I love the Crazy Bitch story, koeeoaddi, that’s a great one. My all-time favorite is very short, but the last few words of the story had me practically dead on the floor laughing when I first read it, years ago. Flavor Mix-Up
Without doing a formal study, it seems to me that they frequently have great concepts in the headline that they can’t sustain for a full article.
Regarding the Jesus and the footprints story, my favorite (non-Onion) alternate ending is Jesus saying “Sometimes I have to help other people you selfish bastard”.
I seem to remember a time when the online version ad headlines that had no story attached. My favorite of these was in an issue that came out shortly after George Harrison died. It said simply “Ringo Next.”
