Do you enjoy reading satirical articles? If so, I bet you would love (or already love) The Onion. Haven’t heard of it? The Onion is a complete news network that features articles and videos that are partially or entirely fictional. They are typically parodies on traditional newspaper articles, featuring both local and international news. For example, a recent article in their sports section was entitled, “Florida Marlins Delay Game Until Their Fan Shows Up.”
The beauty of the news produced by The Onion is that while the facts they report are fictional, the articles are clearly well-constructed, written by an informed author who simply wants to poke fun at a topic; it’s not just random news solely based on someone’s imagination. The Onion boasts itself as “America’s Finest News Source.” And of course it is. Who else could accurately report an article by the title, “Childbirth To Be Area Woman’s Least Painful Interaction With Daughter”?
So, what if the Onion News Network came out with parodies of not just small news articles, but entire books? You guessed it, they already have. Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas of Planet Earth is a parody of the standard desk atlas created by the staff of The Onion. You can bet that this book is packed with humorous and stereotyped description of different countries and smaller regions.
Prior to the making of Our Dumb World, The Onion came out with a different book: Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source, which is naturally also a satire, but this time of the major headlines of the 20th century. It can be a parody of the other end-of-the-century retrospective books published by serious magazines, such as Time.
If you’re okay with dry humor and a few (okay, more than a few) pokes at government (that of others and our own), cultures, and other “sensitive” topics, then reading The Onion can be a breath of fresh air. (That’s a bit of a contradiction.) The staff of The Onion knows quite well that some news is begging to be mocked. This is their calling, and they take it quite seriously.
