In a world plagued by war, famine and Donald Drumpf, I often glide, like a light-seeking jellyfish, to those news organizations that leave me warm and secure and happy. Sure, The New York Times and The Economist inform me of political developments and, as the kids say these days, “give it to me straight.” But to be honest, sometimes the straight-up truth is too much to handle. Sometimes, primary results leave me feeling more dead than alive, like a shell of the critical-thinking person my liberal college education is trying to train me to be. Irony-free analyses of presidential debates don’t enliven me — they instead carve my civic spirit into a shapeless cynical lump.
So where do I go when the world seems darkest — when my vision crowds into a single center frame from which nothing but angst and terror filter through? The Onion. A prime example of news satire, The Onion spares no punches with its depictions — sometimes thought-provoking, infinitely comical — of current events. Since the late ‘80s, this quality news organization has been giving readers fake stories so supremely well-developed that many people have purportedly been tricked into thinking they’re real — a phenomenon recurrent enough a blog was made to document these fake-outs (literallyunbelievable.org).
One can get a sense of The Onion’s hilariousness from a few article titles:
“God Answers Prayer of Paralyzed Little Boy; ‘No, Says God’” (Dec. 9, 1998);
“Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia; Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to Be First Recipients” (December 1995);
and the more recent:
“Horrified Investigators Find Unresponsive Legislative Body In Capitol Building” (March 9, 2016);
“Ben Carson’s Message Undercut By Eyes Drifting In Different Directions” (March 1, 2016)
While The Onion has obvious competition — like The New Yorker’s “Borowitz Report” or its “Daily Shouts & Murmurs” — it does best what any hard-hitting satire news organization is primed to do, especially in the political climate we Americans find ourselves in today: be consistently critical and repeatedly hilarious. And though other sites like thehardtimes.net or thehummusnews.com produce hilarious material, they pander specifically to niche audiences and can’t play to the same national chord The Onion does.
Some might (and do) say that organizations like The Onion do little to earnestly advance the causes and issues about which they write. It may seem unhelpful to consistently publish articles that disparage and outright mock people or events. And yet, I’ve found that in light of the catastrophes of our time, satire is one of the only ways to honestly and painlessly process all the scary stuff going down in the world.
I would agree that it’s difficult to gauge whether levity will impact a situation positively or not. In the case of The Onion, though, this sort of estimation is not one that’s either necessary or really wanted. The Onion, like its fellows, will continue to mock the aspects of our country, our lives and our humanity that are most messed-up regardless of political correctness or what’s considered socially acceptable commentary. In this way, it’s one of the few remaining places untempered criticism can go to live. For example, a video titled “Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine” makes it clear how ridiculous it sounds to legitimately and un-ironically promote, as many people do, capital punishment via lethal injection. Dealing with what is underhandedly one of the most serious and disturbing legal practices today, The Onion uses its platform to point out the inadequacies of any “humane” way to carry out an execution, especially compared with the particular barbarity of lethal injection. In this and all cases, they effectively take serious subjects, imbibe them with humor, and allow their audiences to be struck by the literal ridiculousness of what their articles mean.
In an era bereft of Jonathan Swift or Voltaire, we must instead turn to fake news organizations. Of these, I put my faith in the The Onion.