50 Funniest - The Onion

Now, I am a very big fan of The Onion. I have subscribed to the online video feeds as well as the articles for a long time, and have always gotten a kick out of their writing. Satire is perhaps my favorite kind of humor, as is shown by my adoration of “A Modest Proposal”.

There are many Onion stories over the years I have loved, but this perhaps might be the greatest one I’ve read.

“Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia” is very funny, particularly because it is incredibly true. My family is Ukrainian, so I am used to seeing many strange Eastern-European words, many of which are not particularly vowel-heavy. The article jokes that these words have been “horribly butchered by millions around the world,” which is something I can completely understand. Heck, even my last name “Kozura”, which is actually pretty well-stocked as well as vowels go, is butchered nearly every day. (For the record, its pronounced “COH-ZHUR-UH”, and means “potato farmer” for those who were about to ask.)

The Onion always fabricates really great quotes from its clever “sources,” such as Grg Hmphrs, whose dream in this article is to be “George Humpheries.”

A really dark (but surprisingly hilarious) part of this article is the sentences the article says that Bosnia can create with vowels: “The potatoes are ready,” “I believe it will rain,” and “All of my children are dead from the war.” These are all particularly funny (or not) because they are true. Bosnians live mostly off potatoes. They experience a very large amount of rain, in fact, it has the city with the largest amount of rain every year in Europe. And finally, many children fought young in the many wars Bosnia has been through.

The map that is included with the article, detailing Clinton’s plans to deploy the A’s near Sjlbvdnzv and send the I’s to Dvzk, is actually a really great touch that makes it even more hilarious.

This is actually the kind of touch that makes people who haven’t read The Onion before and are unaware that it’s satirical to believe the story. When this happens, they usually go into some kind of outrage over what (unbeknowingly satirical) topic the article is about. This is seen many times over the years where a person posts an Onion article on Facebook, and make a fool of themselves taking it seriously. They’ll post about how this article is “literally unbelievable,” which is why the phenomenon is now called Literally Unbelievable. There has even been a website created for just that purpose, http://literallyunbelievable.org/ which posts picture of people misunderstanding The Onion’s satire. It is one of my favorite websites ever.

One of the funniest things is that, when people don’t understand that The Onion is satire, they suddenly start labeling The Onion as “AN EXTREMELY LIBERAL BLOG” or “A RIGHT-WING REPUBLICAN NEWSPAPER” depending on who is made to look bad in the article.

An example of a literally unbelievable post…

 

I particularly enjoy the “hologramed head” … I guess photoshop wasn’t good enough for this “republican publication.”