A home for Facebookers who don't get Onion's jokes

[ShyWriter]

A home for Facebookers who don't get Onion's jokes

by Chris Matyszczyk | May 27, 2011 5:03 PM PDT

For any writer who is trying to be funny, there is a very special pain that comes when someone doesn't get the joke.

It hits you somewhere beneath the ribs and the pain then courses around your torso, before finally emerging, days later, from a nostril.

This is a feeling that must often infect those who toil at The Onion, a place that attempts to offer truth delivered through comedic fiction. Sometimes, though, the Onion's writers are just too good. So good, indeed, that people take to Facebook to display their amusing stories as facts.

Now an enterprising Tumblr-er has taken it upon himself or herself to display some of these Facebookers who are taken in by the Onion's headlines. (The names and faces of the posters have been redacted.)

Literally Unbelievable is a compendium of whoa! and woe.

There is the Facebooker who declares: "I'll never comprehend GOD's patience with us! *REPENT* America!!"

This is a sentiment with which it is very hard to disagree. The only slight problem is that it was incited by an Onion article, headlined "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex."

(Credit: Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Then there's the Facebooker who rails: "So much for freedom of speach!" What could possibly have made this person emit such freedom of spelling?

Why, it was the Onion headline: "Government Official Who Makes Perfectly Valid, Well-Reasoned Point Against Israel Forced to Resign."

And what would cause someone to post this opinion on President Obama: "So Much for Obama being the Peace President. Reagan was horrified by the thought of nuclear war and pushed his Soviet counter part to seek a treaty banning all nuclear weapons. Is Obama a nut case or what?"

It could be "or what" as this response was engendered by the Onion headline: "Obama Makes It Through Another Day Of Resisting Urge To Launch All U.S. Nuclear Weapons At Once."

There will be those who will claim that such carelessness on behalf of so many suggests that they are merely skimming the headlines and not reading the texts. I fear that this is not true. I fear that these are people who read the whole beautifully written articles and still believe that they are utterly real.

I am sure you will be able to submit more excellent Facebook posts to this fine and noble Tumblr feed. Surely, at least one of your supposed friends has offered up an Onion posting as if it were gospel.

In memoriam, America. In memoriam.

Source: http://news.cnet.com...0066950-71.html

--END

Shy

[ThexDarksider]

Well, The Onion's stories are really realistic and believable and Facebook is full of all kinds of people, including less bright ones.