What Happened to The Onion?
Posted on:: February 4th, 2003
I loved The Onion. I love The Onion’s book, “Our Dumb Century,” a colossal work of funniness. So can someone tell me what the hell is going on over there? Alternatively, can you find one funny line or comment in the current edition? Did it change or have I lost my sense of humor? Or both?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
It was a bad sign when Mad Magazine did a parody of The Onion, and it was actually funny.
Yeah, I thought the Mad parody was actually surprisingly good since The Onion would seem to be a hard pub to parody.
This is strange indeed. What happened to the onion – a case of an unfunny substitute editor who thinks they are funny? – happened to Scientific American I think sometime in the early 90’s. One day it was a great publication, the next day it was filled with the unfunny stuff.
One of the major Tv networks did a story on the “Onion” within the last few weeks, though I couldn’t find any reference to it on the net. At any rate, perhaps it’s the move to New York, or the pressure on the writers of drafting 30 funny headlines each per day, or maybe the darn planet isn’t as funny as it used to be!
Hey, I’d take ONE funny headline! Besides, they publish every week or so, not every day.
Has the Onion jumped the shark?
I dunno, I thought the headline “Pete Townshend Can’t Explain” was pretty funny, in a kind of queasy way. The rest of it seemed to be Onion By Numbers, though.
>Besides, they publish every week or so, not every day.
Yep, but the segment said that each writer needs to come in each day with 30 funny headline possibilities to tryout on the others. They chuckle or choke.
The Onion goes in streaks — for a while it’s wonderful, then it coasts, then it’s wonderful again.
I don’t mind waiting them out while they coast — and I do not just say that because they’re a hometown institution.
I dont get the Onion. Why Comedy news?So what? Dont they know theres comedy onTV allready. Anyway awrsome blog
To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can’t be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Yes. muschi ( http://www.x24x7.com/muschi.html )
I don’t know what exactly has changed at the Onion, but I feel a huge difference. For a few weeks I felt myself laughing at the headlines out of respect for the past, but I just read it today and had to close the browser. I think the move to New York pulled the roots out. But like someone else said, I can handle ‘a coast’ just as long as they get back to where they were.