Word: onions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ONION The funniest site on the Internet theonion.com shows no sign of losing its satiric edge. Now it has conquered Old Media with the best seller Our Dumb Century. Web migration, it seems, is not a one-way ticket...
...Onion, in case you've a) been living under a rock for the past few years, or b) aren't from Wisconsin and haven't heard of it, is "America's finest news source." It's about the funniest thing going these days, definitely funnier than the Weekly Week and possessing a biting, ironic and absurd sense of humor to which Satire V can only aspire. Started by two University of Wisconsin students in 1988, the Onion got its name from the onion sandwiches on which its founders subsisted while short on cash during the publication's lean years...
...Dumb Century parodies recent historical anthologies such as Harold Evans's The American Century. Thankfully the Onion isn't the one making the real history, for where would we be today if in 1955, as Our Dumb Century reports, Rosa Parks had said "screw this bus shit" and decided to take a cab instead? How would television audiences of the '60s have responded if they could have heard the real conversation during the moon landing, which went something like this...
Obviously, much of the Onion's humor is rather low brow. Its real comic brilliance in Our Dumb Century lies in the way it uses irony to expose the raw, humorous side of human affairs. Headlines such as "Stock Market Invincible" in 1929 and "Archduke Ferdinand Declares 'No Man Can Stop Me"' in 1913 show the follies of complacency and our confidence to predict or control the future. Also, much of the Onion has a very proletarian feel about it, exposing the rulers of society as they dominate the common people, as when Woodrow Wilson promises to "make the world...
Although I haven't seen the Onion anywhere on campus, they do ship to campuses all over the country. But, unless some-one wants to mount a campaign to bring the Onion to Harvard, you'll have to check it out online at www.theonion.com. Harvard even finds a place in Our Dumb Century, when John F. Kennedy calls himself not a powder puff but "Ich bin Ein Ivy-League playboy millionaire" and "Ich bin ein privileged, blue-blood Harvard...