The Onion reaches unfathomable levels of comedy

By Joe Gauger
Collegian Editor
October 3, 2007

If there is one thing that connects me with my high school friends, scattered as they are at schools around the East Coast, it is our common appreciation of The Onion. The team behind the satirical weekly (“America’s Finest News Source”) provide us with a steady source of hilarious jabs at the government, acerbic social commentary, and trenchant deconstruction of the mass media.

The wall of my Facebook is dominated by links to articles as recommended by my schoolyard chums. Dispersed happily amid the vast wasteland of unwanted e-mails I find in my inbox every day, I pick out a select handful of notifications that someone has written on my wall. I know that most often each post represents a priceless find by one of my far-off pals, selected from The Onion’s generous 10-year archive.

No modern philosopher or indie rock band can express my consistent alienation from modern American culture as eloquently as The Onion. If you were not aware that Americans are growing fatter by the day, spend almost as much time watching TV as they do working, and suffer from epidemic delusions of grandeur, the satire of The Onion would bring these trends to light as clearly as sociology dissertation. The paper has the added benefit of allowing the reader to remain awake.

The Onion reproduces a page each week from its 1999 book Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source, a retrospective look at the 20th century. Each page is a compilation of articles about the history and pop culture of a specific year in the American century, from the trust-busting days of Teddy Roosevelt to the Rapture on Jan. 1, 2000. The book’s joke ads brilliantly lampoon the evolving standards of decency in America and take to task America’s long-standing obsession with legal spectacles, referring to half a dozen high-profile court cases as the “trial of the century.” Most appealing to me, though, is its angry New Left critique of U.S. foreign policy. Anyone (who happens to be of my political persuasion) can write and angrily rant about the hypocrisy of Woodrow Wilson in entering World War I, but it takes a special kind of cynicism to describe that decision as a move to “make the world safe for corporate oligarchy.” Comic gold.

Almost anything from The Onion will hold my interest, but the best articles are those which are so true-to-life that they cease to be funny and merely make me sad. The most spectacular example is “Bush 2004 Campaign Promises to Restore Honor and Dignity to the White House” (Jan. 28, 2004). After watching the Bush Administration flaunt its promises to repair the Oval Office’s reputation after the scurrility of the Clinton regime, I knew that this would be a very good description of the rhetoric we would all hear in the coming months. Sure enough, the president’s reelection effort parroted the lines written by The Onion’s author for the next nine months. I watched helplessly for the duration of the campaign, looking back frequently at the oh-too-true words printed early in the political process: “After years of false statements and empty promises, it’s time for big changes in Washington.” I laughed, I cried and I devoted myself as a perpetual Onion reader.

gaugerj1@lasalle.edu