Humor is the answer!

“God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy: ‘No,’ says God”; “Congress Deadlocked Over How Not to Provide Healthcare”; “Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving to Remote Village”, are just a few of the thousands of satirical news headlines that have graced the pages of The Onion. For those of you still not in on the joke, The Onion reports on newsworthy events both real and imagined in the extremely mock-able objective voice of real newspapers. The Onion’s journalistic tone is so ironically familiar that its headlines and stories undermine our ability to know better.

The Onion has coyly carved out an entertaining niche in world where our newspaper stories often fall into the giant gap between what we know and what we think we know. As the world continues to become overwhelmingly accessible and quite often manipulated, satire like The Onion, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report has emerged to shed light on national consciousness.

The Onion brilliantly uses humor as a tool to reveal our unexamined assumptions about life.  For instance, political hot topics like the gun debate can inevitably lead opposing sides into their predictably boring arguments and cable talk show scream-athons. While amusing at first, these interactions ultimately prevent me from turning on the TV when I want to relax. The Onion takes a different tack with headlines like, “Guns Are Only Deadly if Used for Their Intended Purpose” and “Texans Elect Gun.” Their satirical humor is unexpectedly disarming and a great resource for pacifying disagreement, because both liberals and conservatives can at least agree to laugh at these articles.

That’s why I love The Onion, it helps me laugh at the conflicted interests of the news-reporting industry, and then to laugh a little softer at the conflicted masses that believe it all.