This Is Not Your Paternal Unit's Onion

June 21, 2005 2:56 PM

Final Installment of Frogger Poised to Sweep Oscars All the regular cast of characters return remain in this 2056 A.D. edition of Americorp.biz's Finest News Source. If you haven't visited lately, you can easily catch up on the last 51 years.
posted by hal9k (45 comments total)

so, in the future the onion stops being funny?
posted by photoslob at 3:05 PM on June 21, 2005

The Onion stopped being funny in the past, when they moved to New York. In the future The Onion website will be composed of lots of awful little Flash modules.
posted by Nelson at 3:12 PM on June 21, 2005

Is it June 21st Fools Day already?
posted by mathowie at 3:13 PM on June 21, 2005

Forgive me for disputing the apparent snark-du-jour, but yes, The Onion is still funny. OK, perhaps not as dependably so as in the past - but I still get genuine laughs there - and totally enjoyed this special issue. So good on them!

Jest, on the other hand, has been consistently horrible since day one.
posted by MaxVonCretin at 3:23 PM on June 21, 2005

The sound is annoying and totally, completely pointless. They recognize the nag factor with the disclaimer but fail to realize the little sound bites add nothing.
posted by mek at 3:27 PM on June 21, 2005

If it weren't for the crappy flash, I would give it a thumbs-up.

I still remember my two favorite Onion headlines:
1. Kuwait deploys troop.
2. Plowshares hastily beaten back into swords.
posted by mystyk at 3:27 PM on June 21, 2005

I thought "Chinese factory employee can't believe shit he makes for Americans" from the last issue was pretty good.
posted by ori at 3:37 PM on June 21, 2005

My favorite Onion headline was "Jesus converts to Islam"
posted by sotonohito at 3:45 PM on June 21, 2005

Last weeks "Plan To Trap Boyfriend Aborted" cracked me up.
posted by belling at 3:45 PM on June 21, 2005

Yeah, The Onion jumped the shark when they moved to NY, but they have moments of brilliance now and again. This issue wasn't very funny but I did like this headline.

My favorite headline from "Our Dumb Century", (from 1914)

"Austrian Archduke Ferdinand boasts: "No man can stop me!"
posted by zardoz at 3:45 PM on June 21, 2005

My favorite Onion article ever was "I Think I'm Going About This Cat-Breeding Thing All Wrong".

Um... in the future!
posted by gurple at 3:51 PM on June 21, 2005

Favorite Headline:

'Drinking Dog Urine Cures Cancer' Say Snickering Scientists
posted by solotoro at 3:53 PM on June 21, 2005

All-time favorite was always: "Angry Lumberjack Demands Hearty Breakfast"

Their first issue after 9/11 was unbelievably great. I wish I had saved a copy.
posted by Hlewagast at 3:54 PM on June 21, 2005

My money is on "37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster". It's closest to home. :)
posted by soundofsuburbia at 4:07 PM on June 21, 2005

Hlewagast: Agree. Fantastic stuff. "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule"
posted by blag at 4:12 PM on June 21, 2005

Wayback machine archive

"U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With"
posted by blag at 4:15 PM on June 21, 2005

I am clueless as to why this post wasn't deleted. Two links - one to the front page of the Onion, one to an article in the Onion. Matt even commented in this thread, somehow validating its presence. Am I missing something? How is this not the lamest post in recent history, beating out all the newsfilter/Tom Cruise/Michael J./whatever posts?

I'm going to go out now, get drunk with my new wife, and try to forget this whole business.
posted by Item at 4:41 PM on June 21, 2005

The onion radio spots are pretty good. Sometimes.
posted by snsranch at 4:45 PM on June 21, 2005

the more things change...

(cute--thanks hal--they have gone downhill tho)
posted by amberglow at 4:46 PM on June 21, 2005

I'm going to go out now, get drunk with my new wife, and try to forget this whole business.

Good idea. Back away from the computer....
posted by iamck at 4:51 PM on June 21, 2005

Aww, the language selector doesn't do anything.
posted by Four Flavors at 5:22 PM on June 21, 2005

Okay, so the onion isn't the onion you know from college and this was probably an aborted april fools project, but its pretty fucking good. Especially the little headlines and the opinion pieces about a female dolphin president.

Calls for deletion seem a bit odd considering this is one of the best things I've seen on mefi in a while.
posted by skallas at 5:33 PM on June 21, 2005

A fellow MetaFiltarian from somewhere you can get The Onion for free sent me a copy of the post-9/11 issue. It is one of my most valued possessions.

Oh, and best headline? "Super-monkey-collider loses funding."
posted by ColdChef at 5:50 PM on June 21, 2005

item, mousing over the links makes them look like they'd be deleted, but the actual page is a special edition that one wouldn't necessarily know about, considering one doesn't bother checking the onion much anymore... I agree, post-wisconsin isn't much to get excited about

I found this amusing, but 2056 seems a bit early for dolphin presidents.
posted by mdn at 6:05 PM on June 21, 2005

all time: "Special Olympics tee pitches no-hitter."
issue: "fat Britney chosen for new holo-stamps."
posted by carsonb at 6:21 PM on June 21, 2005

A fellow MetaFiltarian from somewhere you can get The Onion for free sent me a copy of the post-9/11 issue. It is one of my most valued possessions.

subliminal marketing?
posted by mr.marx at 6:24 PM on June 21, 2005

there was a recent one that was clever:

"fetus can feel daddy kick"
posted by jeremy b at 6:54 PM on June 21, 2005

"Enchanted by own innocence, Michael Jackson molests self."
posted by John Shaft at 7:02 PM on June 21, 2005

I was all set with:

the onion still sucks

and

apparently web design went down the crapper

But seems like others beat me to it. Honestly, the Onion hasn't been very funny for a long time, maybe one or two funny articles every once in a while, but...

I hadn't realized that they'd actually moved to New York, my guess is that there are a lot of good places for funny writers in NYC, and that they just can't get the good ones to work for them. The 'short bits' and 'disembodied headlines' are often funny, but the full articles never seem to intresting.

posted by delmoi at 7:06 PM on June 21, 2005

"Holiday Revelers Deck the Living Shit out of Local Hall"
posted by FYKshun at 7:11 PM on June 21, 2005

the one right after 9/11 was amazing, because they were the only ones who weren't afraid to mock.
posted by amberglow at 7:21 PM on June 21, 2005

I thought the same of the post-9/11 one, amberglow — I put it on the MeFi front page, though back then linking to www.theonion.com got quite a bit more skepticism from those who speak for the MeFi mos maiorum...
posted by Zurishaddai at 7:51 PM on June 21, 2005

Don't forget the eerily prophetic "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over" put in Bush's mouth from the 2000 election coverage.

My favorite -- aside from the 9/11 brilliance, which you can't really compare to anythinge else, it's sui generis -- has to be from the "100 years of the Onion" book. OK, favorites.

The best is
HOLY SHIT
MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON
shopped into the NY Times.

They probably didn't know they'd want to riff it for the 9/11 issue, at the time. But again, sui generis -- and weren't they glad they'd been so parsimonious with potty-mouth humor? We really needed it.

The other was Dec. 8, 1941, in an impossibly ginormous typeface:
WA-
R!

My take on the longer articles is that they've never worked particularly well. It's a sketch and the requirements of the form, like an SNL sketch, make it go on a bit longer than it really should. I did determine once that reading the longer-form pieces in the physical Onion was much funnier than reading them online. (I bet there's some sort of human-factors explanation for that.) In person, or maybe because you're often in public, you start giggling and the paper shakes and you have to hold it still again to finish reading and it all sort of builds and like a multiple orgasm climaxes successively until you're done.

Still, most of them are just long because they need to be to fully parody the AP Style format, not because they have that much funny in them to begin with, and if you're not laughing at the format the whole way, you won't make it to the end.
posted by dhartung at 12:30 AM on June 22, 2005

The Onion, while (natch) not being as funny as it used to be was a notable let-down post 9-11. It played it pretty safe. Private Eye' was sharper. The magazine's cover featured an aide briefing George W. Bush on the tragedy. The aide says, "It's Armageddon, sir"; to which the President replies, "Armageddon outta here".
posted by rhymer at 3:09 AM on June 22, 2005

What rhymer said. The first post-9/11 issue was a huge letdown, playing things *very* safe in the midst of all that "oh my stars irony is now dead" crap. I guess folks were looking to laugh or something, but that issue was just plain boring.

That said, We Need A Fourth Law Of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife is a pretty damn fucking funny headline.
posted by mediareport at 4:16 AM on June 22, 2005

Comments about the onion not being funny are not funny.
posted by iamck at 5:56 AM on June 22, 2005

iamck : "Comments about the onion not being funny are not funny."

Comments about double negatives being gramatically wrong are not double negatives.
posted by bugbread at 6:47 AM on June 22, 2005

For my money, the funniest headline they've dropped so far is still "Jenna Bush's Federally Protected Wetlands Now Open for Public Drilling"

although I do have to agree, I tune in now for Savage Love and pretty much ignore the front page. They lost me when they started recycling old articles and hoping long-time readers wouldn't notice because they'd changed a couple of words.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:25 AM on June 22, 2005

"Laura Bush noisily devours infant"

accompanied by her photo, with THAT smile, so alien...
posted by billder at 7:45 AM on June 22, 2005

I liked "Supreme Court Overturns Car".
posted by kenko at 8:16 AM on June 22, 2005

"Dolphins develop opposable thumbs: Oh, Shit, says humanity."
posted by matildaben at 9:58 AM on June 22, 2005

I found this amusing, but 2056 seems a bit early for dolphin presidents.

Well, sure, that's What You Think.
posted by soyjoy at 10:03 AM on June 22, 2005

"Melon Balled"

"Nation's Experts Give Up"

"My Collection of Cassingles is Second to None"
posted by scratch at 12:02 PM on June 22, 2005

"Alec Baldwin Secretes Own Hair Gel."

Truly - the onion still rocks.
posted by selfmedicating at 6:48 PM on June 22, 2005

"Ebert Wins" (with a photo of him giving a thumbs up)

So wrong, yet so, so right.

Anyway, mostly I read it for the AV Club now, which remains some of the best cultural coverage anywhere. The funny parts are all right, but really, fake ap-style news doesn't really work that well anymore, not in the era of the Daily Show and, well, the real newspapers.
posted by thecaddy at 2:32 PM on June 23, 2005