The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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The Onion staff, "Our Dumb Century"

Started Jan 4 � Finished May 26, 2002; 169 pages. Posted 27 May 2002

Okay, I know a lot of people have this. I�ve seen a lot of people buy this, and it�s something we have a hard time keeping in the store. But has anybody ever really tried to sit down and read it? I mean really READ it, not just grazing over the headlines? Front to back?

I don�t recommend it.

Back before I didn�t know shit about news writing, one of the first things they drilled into us was to avoid being repetitive. One of the biggest sins, however, came from layout. The absolute worst thing you could do was to repeat the lede (meaning the first paragraph) in the headline. The headline was the ultimate to catch your eye, but if the headline succeeded in its job and sucked the reader in and they then read the same information in the first graph, they would most likely stop reading the story. After all, if you had already read the most important part, why would you want to read it again?

Well, The Onion has some great headlines. One of my favorites has to be "Jim Henson Stuffed, Given Googly Eyeballs, Placed in Smithsonian." But if you actually read the accompanying story, more often than not the same joke is repeated in the first graph.

And it gets worse, because more often than that the rest of the story will systematically go over each part of the joke for the entire article. As my mom used to tell me as a child, "Once is funny, twice is tiresome, three times is annoying, and after that you�ll be cutting your own switch from the vines in the backyard."

Here�s an example. The headline reads, "Author Ernest Hemingway Grits Teeth, Beds Nurse, Fights in War, Sits at Bar, Remembers Nurse." Okay, that was funny enough, especially since I had just finished For Whom the Bell Tolls. But then you read the second paragraph.

"According to the papers, the famous writer and journalist gritted his teeth manfully, bedded a young Expeditionary Forces nurse, fought as a Red Cross ambulance driver in the Great War, sat in Harry�s Bar in Paris, and reminisced about his sexual conquest of the nurse through a whiskey-smoked lens of nostalgia and nameless sorrow for himself and all mankind."

Okay, that was tiresome. Then every new graph details each part of the headline, only adding a few extra words.

Time to hunt for a switch. Here�s a hint from somebody who knows better: Don�t get a really wimpy switch or try to give it a stress fracture it before you hand it over to your parents. You�ll only make them angrier.

Still, though, occasionally they would bring out a new joke, like the one with Jim Henson ending with the statement, "Jim Henson�s arms will be stripped of all muscle and sinew, leaving stick-like appendages supported by thin rods. The rods will be flailed about wildly by skilled puppeteers in a special Smithsonian ceremony honoring Henson Nov. 1."

The stories also got better as we moved closer to the present, and I have to give them credit for thinking of the best tagline for the September 11th attacks. While corporations like CNN and the other networks had stupid slogans like "America Under Attack" and "Crisis in New York," The Onion had a tagline that summed it all up:

�Holy Fucking Shit!�


Rating: Worth working in a used bookstore and getting for super cheap, if only to browse the headlines.

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