Comments on: This Is Not Your Paternal Unit's Onion

This Is Not Your Paternal Unit's Onion

hal9k — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:56:30 -0800

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.

By: photoslob

photoslob — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:05:48 -0800

so, in the future the onion stops being funny?

By: Nelson

Nelson — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:12:31 -0800

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.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:13:28 -0800

Is it June 21st Fools Day already?

By: MaxVonCretin

MaxVonCretin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:23:02 -0800

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.

By: mek

mek — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:27:36 -0800

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.

By: mystyk

mystyk — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:27:46 -0800

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.

By: ori

ori — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:37:18 -0800

I thought "Chinese factory employee can't believe shit he makes for Americans" from the last issue was pretty good.

By: sotonohito

sotonohito — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:45:34 -0800

My favorite Onion headline was "Jesus converts to Islam"

By: belling

belling — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:45:46 -0800

Last weeks "Plan To Trap Boyfriend Aborted" cracked me up.

By: zardoz

zardoz — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:45:49 -0800

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!"

By: gurple

gurple — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:51:03 -0800

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

By: solotoro

solotoro — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:53:31 -0800

Favorite Headline: 'Drinking Dog Urine Cures Cancer' Say Snickering Scientists

By: Hlewagast

Hlewagast — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:54:26 -0800

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.

By: soundofsuburbia

soundofsuburbia — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:07:15 -0800

My money is on "37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster". It's closest to home. :)

By: blag

blag — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:12:52 -0800

Hlewagast: Agree. Fantastic stuff. "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule"

By: blag

blag — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:15:44 -0800

Wayback machine archive "U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With"

By: Item

Item — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:41:47 -0800

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.

By: snsranch

snsranch — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:45:28 -0800

The onion radio spots are pretty good. Sometimes.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:46:30 -0800

the more things change... (cute--thanks hal--they have gone downhill tho)

By: iamck

iamck — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:51:42 -0800

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....

By: Four Flavors

Four Flavors — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 17:22:57 -0800

Aww, the language selector doesn't do anything.

By: skallas

skallas — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 17:33:23 -0800

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.

By: ColdChef

ColdChef — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 17:50:51 -0800

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."

By: mdn

mdn — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 18:05:28 -0800

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.

By: carsonb

carsonb — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 18:21:31 -0800

all time: "Special Olympics tee pitches no-hitter." issue: "fat Britney chosen for new holo-stamps."

By: mr.marx

mr.marx — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 18:24:26 -0800

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?

By: jeremy b

jeremy b — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 18:54:23 -0800

there was a recent one that was clever: "fetus can feel daddy kick"

By: John Shaft

John Shaft — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:02:33 -0800

"Enchanted by own innocence, Michael Jackson molests self."

By: delmoi

delmoi — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:06:28 -0800

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.

By: FYKshun

FYKshun — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:11:12 -0800

"Holiday Revelers Deck the Living Shit out of Local Hall"

By: amberglow

amberglow — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:21:32 -0800

the one right after 9/11 was amazing, because they were the only ones who weren't afraid to mock.

By: Zurishaddai

Zurishaddai — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:51:28 -0800

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...

By: dhartung

dhartung — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:30:23 -0800

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.

By: rhymer

rhymer — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 03:09:21 -0800

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".

By: mediareport

mediareport — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 04:16:39 -0800

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.

By: iamck

iamck — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 05:56:53 -0800

Comments about the onion not being funny are not funny.

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 06:47:00 -0800

iamck : "Comments about the onion not being funny are not funny." Comments about double negatives being gramatically wrong are not double negatives.

By: caution live frogs

caution live frogs — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 07:25:09 -0800

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.

By: billder

billder — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 07:45:22 -0800

"Laura Bush noisily devours infant" accompanied by her photo, with THAT smile, so alien...

By: kenko

kenko — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:16:47 -0800

I liked "Supreme Court Overturns Car".

By: matildaben

matildaben — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:58:27 -0800

"Dolphins develop opposable thumbs: Oh, Shit, says humanity."

By: soyjoy

soyjoy — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 10:03:43 -0800

I found this amusing, but 2056 seems a bit early for dolphin presidents. Well, sure, that's What You Think.

By: scratch

scratch — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:02:16 -0800

"Melon Balled" "Nation's Experts Give Up" "My Collection of Cassingles is Second to None"

By: selfmedicating

selfmedicating — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 18:48:58 -0800

"Alec Baldwin Secretes Own Hair Gel." Truly - the onion still rocks.

By: thecaddy

thecaddy — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:32:18 -0800

"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.