Not just in-jokes, but in-jokes that you had to be an up-and-coming young, hip, with-it Manhattanite to understand. I used to enjoy reading it, too, but the attitude of the magazine was similar to that of the infamous “A New Yorker’s View of the World” poster.
There’s a few places where The Onion can be found for free in curbside newspaper boxes, right alongside the local Thursday freesheet and the new home guides. In Denver, the paper Onion was free, and it contained ads for businesses in the Boulder area.
My favorite: “Area Man Dies After Short, Cowardly Battle With Cancer.”
Yes, Punch had good points to it even near the end. Why, I even liked their “Photo-Synthesis” series, which were after all political cartoons made by somebody too lazy to draw.
I was thinking about this and I remembered another part of the downfall of Punch. Near the end, it seemed like every “Letter to the Editor,” comedy submission, etc. was made by someone outside of England. It appeared that no-one in England was actually reading Punch–that might not have been the truth, natch, but that was the perception. Furthermore, their humour, while unfailingly Anglophilic, sometimes was more geared to foreigners than Englishmen. The publishers didn’t help things by slashing the foreign subscription rates to a level even I could afford, while the domestic rates looked high to me. Perhaps they just lost their way with the English population. A couple of years later, when I was living in England full-time, I mentioned to someone that Punch was no longer printing, and she said, “Yes, they stopped making that magazine in the sixties.”
The Onion is already boring and tired like National Lampoon. How many times can they do “Area Man Engages in Mundane Act”.
The Daily Show is much better, even though their news is much slower. It’s sad to be watching a new episode and hear Jon Stewart reading stories that I read about on the internet one week ago.
Yeah! With all the archives and reprints, I still have never seen “Ask the Dungeonmaster” reprinted anywhere. Second best thing The Onion ever wrote.
Preach it, Brother. A while back, I made a concerted effort to find “Congress Revises Food-Crime Equivilency Ratings”. No dice. I’d love to read that one again…
The Onion has had some true classics, but I tire of stories that rely entirely on shock value (good satire isn’t necessarily bitter and cruel) or the above mentioned “Area Man Does Something Mundane” shtick.
Another weakness is that they’re sometimes saddled with the burden of having to write stories that can’t possibly be funnier than the headline alone. (Ironically, the more hilarious the headline, the less there is to say in the story!) Kind of like people who tell a funny joke and then ruin it by explaining the punchline.
Check out www.nationallampoon.com
Example:
Do You Want a Piece of Me?
by A Pie
Is that all they have, a web site? I haven’t seen an actual Cracked Magazine on the news stands for years.