the onion

The Onion deletes offensive tweet about child Oscar nominee

The Onion has deleted a tweet that called 9-year-old Best Actress Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis an extremely offensive name.

In its original tweet, the parody publication -- which is known for its dark humor and for regularly skewering public figures and institutions -- wrote that, "Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhane Wallis is kind of a c---, right?"

Normally, The Onion is known by its many fans to be joking about almost everything it publishes -- even though its satire is often seen as legitimate commentary on a wide range of issues. But in … Read more

Amazon's new original comedy programs might not suck

As a guy blogging for a site owned by a television network (CBS Interactive is the parent company of CNET), count me as both excited and worried about Amazon's lineup of pilots for original comedy series.

So far, the forays into original programming by the likes of Netflix and Hulu and Amazon have been a mixed bag -- Netflix's "Lillyhammer"? Blech. Hulu's "Battleground"? More please.

But the six comedy pilots that will be posted to Amazon Instant Video for free viewing look to be upping the game significantly. Some of the names behind … Read more

Chinese news site falls for Kim Jong-un 'sexiest man alive' tale

Sexy is in the eye of the beholder. The beholder of the whip, that is.

Many Western news sites couldn't contain their titters after they heard that China's official Communist mouthguard -- the People's Daily -- announced that North Korea's cherubic-faced youth, Kim Jong-un, had been voted "The Sexiest Man Alive."

No, he wasn't voted by the People's Daily. This wasn't even People magazine. It was that sensitive publication dedicated to the human image, the Onion.

As the Associated Press pictured it, the People's Daily decided to honor this momentous … Read more

The Onion's joyous crucifixion of social media gurus

The present is social. The future is social. Media is social.

It's quite amazing that people still manage to hate each other so much.

Perhaps things are a little more complex than we first thought -- or perhaps social media experts truly are the troubling bags of wind that "Saturday Night Live" recently suggested they might be.

Less leaping on the bandwagon and more skewering the still-twitching carcass, The Onion has just released a video that masquerades as a TED talk.

I am grateful to TechCrunch for spotting this phenomenon, in which a sprightly intellectual young thing … Read more

'Real or Onion': Can you spot the satire?

"Congress Accidentally Approves Arts Funding."

Did that headline come from a serious news outlet or did you just get duped by The Onion? A new addition to the AppStore called Real or Onion challenges you to a game of spot the satire.

Gelf Magazine co-founder David Goldenberg came up with the idea after pausing for a second to question the sincerity of a Reuters headline ("Rap music glamorizes drug use - study").

The game is simple. You're presented with a headline and it's your job to determine the source. Based on your guess, you'll either be taken to a mainstream news site or to the original article on The Onion, along with results that compare your overall score with that of to other players.… Read more

Onion tweets itself into trouble, but consider the source

Humor is only skin deep. No, wait. That's beauty. Humor is deep beneath the skin and merely masquerades as beautifully superficial.

The Onion has mined the true depths of humor for quite a while now. However, yesterday it seems to have peeled its way into something of a misstep.

You see, unless you were unreasonably detained by your Congressman yesterday, you'll know that the Onion tweeted this: "BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building."

There wasn't so much as a link with this little tweet, which might (or might not) be the … Read more

The 404 831: Where Tupac Shakur will not cameo in 'The Hangover 3' (podcast)

We're back from the holiday weekend and we all had a good time--until "The Hangover 2" happened. The movie itself wasn't as awful as expected, so tune into a spoiler-free review on today's episode before you rush out and give Zach Galifianakis another $14 bucks.

The 404 Digest for Episode 831

PBS Hacked, claims 'Tupac alive' in New Zealand. " Literally Unbelievable" is a blog dedicated to Facebook posts that don't know The Onion is satirical. It's official: iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud. Jeff show and tell: LightDims.

Episode 831 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

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

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 … Read more