This one drifted past my eyes just recently and it made me laugh out loud.
Manchester attack inquiry: MI5 accused of ‘obsessive focus on secrecy’
For those unaware, MI5 is the…err… UK secret service.
Well, this is the country that gave the world the following road sign:
Along the lines of “There Are Rings Around Uranus” we have:
Which seriously ask the questions “Why study Uranus?” and “How You Can Support Uranus Exploration?”.
Something similar happened in America when Aldrich Ames was caught selling secrets to the Russians. CNN’s headline was “Spy discovered in the CIA”… orly? There are spies in the CIA? Stop the presses!
My parents were in publishing. Many years ago, they subscribed to a monthly trade magazine that dedicated its back page to ambiguous headlines that were funny. I remember a few:
TUNA BITING OFF WASHINGTON COAST
TALKS TO BEAR ON ARMS RACE
One needs to be wary of made-up headlines and Onion articles, but here’s a link to purported funny headlines that contains the Tuna example I believe to be true: Linguistic humor
Oh, and this thread would not be complete without the greatest headline my inner 13-year-old has ever seen:
https://apsari.com/uranus-atmosphere-leaking-into-space-nasa-finds
Years ago I lived in Las Vegas. I knew one of the local paper’s staff photographers who knew the guy who did front page layout for them. The layout man was very subversive as well as real clever. He retired in about 1995. But his work was infamous across town.
Rarely were the headlines themselves ambiguous, but this guy would put the articles together so the pic from article A and the headline from article B were side by side to make a funny. Or one headline and another sub-head would clash like crazy. If you kept your eyes open you’d see a good one every week or two.
One of his most memorable occurred during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Yeltsin. The main headline was something close to “Russia Appoints New Government”. The sidebar just to the left of the big “R” had a ~2"x3" picture of Mr. Spock in the uniform of the then-current movie. The text in the sidebar below the pic was about an upcoming SFCon where Nimoy would be a keynote attraction.
Totally “innocent.” Totally deniable. Totally awesome.
I could not get a screenshot. In the sf film Solaris, George Clooney had a nude scene. This upset some people. The headline? “Big Stink Over Clooney’s Butt”
I swear.
@Spice_Weasel Sorry - I don’t quite get the “unintentional humour” in that one. That’s actually what happened.
I had a friend who did an internship for the Toronto Star. She showed me similar examples to what you mention. When she worked in the entertainment section, the entertainment editors for the Sunday version would arrange it so the top headline across multiple pages created a sentence of similar funny “subversive” messages. They often took fun shots at politicians or celebrities.
I’d also add that I don’t think a lot of these examples are actually unintentionally funny, I think they are intentionally funny.
There are some very clever people out there.
The trick is slipping it by whatever humo(u)rless pointy haired boss the paper has. Maybe even the Boss has embraced it as a gimmick to sell more papers as long as it’s not too often or too blatant.
But for the Important Papers of Record Harrumph!, that may be a bridge too far for management and the workers have to slip them under the radar. So “officially inadvertant”, but very much on purpose down in the bowels of the produciton.
Keep an eye on the Brighton and Hove Argus and Northern Territories News (though none of these are inadvertent.
Unlike the famous WW2 example:
8th Army Push Bottles Up Germans.
“Lucky Man Sees Pals Die” - Mountain Echo, Mountain Home, Arkansas.
Back when I was doing typesetting, If someone had written the text, but hadn’t yet written the headline, we’d put “Head to Come” in place of the headline. More than once, I remember “Head to Come” being printed.
“Meat Shortage: MP’s Attack Minister”
Tips of what‽
I can’t find the article anymore, but the headline was
"Extinct" Booby Exposed, Found Using Alias
from National Geographic. Almost certainly intentional, but still amusing.
It was about the Tasman booby (the bird, obviously), who was thought to be an extinct relative of the masked booby, but recent DNA tests revealed that it was actually the same bird.
I’d like to think this is unintentional but probably not.
“Two Convicts Evade Noose; Jury Hung”