In 1999, while perusing the newsstand at the nearest big-box bookstore, I picked up a paper and began reading. The front-page headline grabbed my attention. It read, “New Study Too Frightening to Release.”
The story began with the simple phrase, Researchers at Stanford University…
“Wow,” I must have thought. “This is an important story.”
Researchers at Stanford University are refusing to release a comprehensive three-year interdisciplinary study on the grounds that the results are “too terrifying to reveal to the public at large,” sources close to the project announced Monday.
The next paragraph began with a quote from Dr. Desmond Oerter, “head of the Stanford team,” leading into an explanation of why the findings are being held. The intro served to establish legitimacy before launching into the following lines from “Dr. Oerter”:
“So soul-shaking are the conclusions we have drawn, they would, if released, result in no less than the total breakdown of societal order, including the abandonment of the current political and economic system, rioting, looting, mass suicide and even, quite possibly, global thermonuclear war.”
Something stirred deep within me as I read these words—conflicting feelings of fear and jubilation. For a brief moment, I feared this may be true, while simultaneously knowing it couldn’t possibly be.
“I beg the forgiveness of God for unleashing this hellish study upon humanity,” added Oerter, dropping to his knees. “I am death, destroyer of worlds.”
And with that, the laughter sprang from the depths of my core. Before the article reached the pure farce of its conclusion, I was hooked on written satire forever.
The Process of Satire
That story came from The Onion, a satirical newspaper that originated with students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It wasn’t the first publication of its kind. Universities have long launched parody newspapers. And it wasn’t the first national publication to do satire. Mad Magazine had been in circulation since the 1950s. But with the “dot com” boom of the late 1990s expanding its reach, The Onion pumped its no-holds-barred college satire off campus and to the masses at a level unseen before.
The Onion has been at the top of its game for so long that it is as synonymous with written satire as SNL is with sketch comedy.
Although the final product may seem lawless and chaotic, Onion articles are built through a fine-tuned assembly line process. Early Onion staff member Brian Janosch described the process in a 2019 TED Talk.
The starting point of every Onion article is its headline. Staff writers come up with 15 headlines on a topic, developed separately from the rest of the team. Those headlines are submitted, and in a pre-meeting meeting, the majority are sent to the cutting-room floor. By the end of the creative brainstorming session, only around 3% of all the headlines make it into The Onion.
One key element in whittling down headlines and building out articles from them is that, in team brainstorming sessions, ideas are detached from their creators. According to Janosch, this serves to “remove the ‘preciousness’” of ideas among team members.
For creatives, this method of idea-elimination can be devastating, but the final product is a testament to The Onion’s creative process.
Is This Real?
What The Onion has perfected is a type of satire that, at first glance, can be difficult to recognize as such.
In 1999, when I first read about the “New Study Too Frightening to Release,” I was working as a residence hall director at my alma mater. I purchased the paper and unintentionally left it lying around in the lobby of the freshmen dorm I was responsible for.
One day, I was walking across campus and ran into Josiah, one of my residents. He had an extremely concerned look on his face and said he needed to show me something. He reached into his backpack, pulled out the paper I had left out the night before, and pointed at the headline.
“You need to read this,” Josiah told me. “I think it’s pretty serious.”
I chuckled, then scanned his face for a reciprocation of laughter, but found none. He didn’t know, and was preparing for the worst.
Josiah and I are now friends, and we laugh hard about this every few years when we see each other. I’m just a few years older than him, but at that point, I had more experience with practices such as hermeneutics and deciphering of literary context. Josiah is a brilliant guy, but as an 18-year-old, didn’t yet have the tools to recognize fiction parading as fact.
What Satire Does
Satire doesn’t have a singular goal. It can parody everyday life or create absurd, imaginary worlds. It is most potent, however, when it points its pen at power to describe what everyone sees but few people are brave enough to say out loud: the emperor has no clothes. And this is key: it must do so regardless of which naked emperor is in power.
This is what separates The Onion from The Babylon Bee, its far inferior Christian impersonator. The Babylon Bee can be mildly humorous when it takes aim at someone in power that is ideologically opposed to its more conservative audience. But it loses all legitimacy when it treats its MAGA friends with kid gloves, parodying their style but not their substance.
To be sure, The Onion doesn’t necessarily have a squeaky clean record of bipartisan power-skewering. Like many left-of-center institutions, they struggled sometimes not to fawn over Barack Obama during his presidency. They gained their footing toward the end by focusing on his administration’s heavy use of drone warfare, but by that point it was too late.
They made up for it, however, during the Biden years.
When Vice President Biden occupied arguably the least powerful job in the federal government, The Onion created “Diamond Joe,” a hilarious parody of an aging but vibrant dude who was emotionally stuck in the 1970s.
But when he became President, “Diamond Joe” was retired and immediately replaced with an old man whose long history on the earth shifted from being his greatest asset to his most dangerous liability. By naming what we all saw with our own eyes before some of us were willing to verbalize it, The Onion regained its prophetic ability to critique those in power who were generally favored by its audience.
Satire’s Dilemma
Regardless of what satire does, it does it best from a place of feigned ignorance, presenting itself as a part of the world it is trying to dismantle. This creates a dilemma, particularly for any faith-based organization seeking to use satire to advance its mission. This has taken on deeper meaning for me during the recent launch of Good Faith Media’s satirical platform, Bad Faith Media.
One of the dangers of good written satire that is far more salient in 2026 than when The Onion was first published in 1988 is the possibility that it will be inadvertently shared as information, which, by its nature, is misinformation. This leads to the belief that satire is harder to pull off in the age of Trump because you can’t make things any more outrageous than what comes out of his mouth or his administration.
This begs the question: should satire be labeled as such? If so, how and where? Is it enough for the context clues of the platform it appears on to indicate it’s satire, or should each article and social media post be labeled as satire?
I have my opinions, which change by the minute.
As for satire being more difficult during the Trump years, I get it. The already high bar of being considered a good satirist skyrocketed in 2017, when Trump pressed “send” on his tweet that read, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”
But I believe this is a gift. It separates those whose humor is skillful enough to reach a mass audience from those who are only funny to their friends, moms, and subordinates. It highlights that there are more nuanced ways to do satire than by going beyond the subject into absurdity, such as going in the opposite direction from the extreme.
(I’m no satirist. However, Rustle S’more, one of the greatest artists the genre has ever seen, recently wrote a piece for BFM that can serve as an example of this.)
As to whether satire should be labeled, I am torn.
I am no comedic genius, but I am certain that the words “this is a joke” have rarely made a joke funnier. They are usually an indication that the joke wasn’t funny. And satire, which is slightly different from a joke, loses its punch when it can’t present itself as a part of the world it is trying to dismantle.
At the same time, many of the context clues that nudge us to recognize something as satire are obscured or nonexistent when we receive our information through disembodied social media posts. We can only process so much information, and so much text is battling for our attention. So when our busy brains are presented with a headline and the name of the platform it appears on, we often choose just one to read before (and if) we click on the link. We usually choose the headline.
Additionally, a faith-based organization—at least one seeking to operate with integrity—is constrained by something The Onion doesn’t have to worry about, which is a responsibility to our readers to be honest and respectful.
At Good Faith Media, with a mission that includes advancing inclusivity, being respectful means we must also contend with the reality that many brains are wired in ways that don’t recognize humor as quickly or easily as they recognize information and patterns. We have as much of a responsibility to people with those types of brains as we do to the craft of satire.
I don’t know what this all means for Bad Faith Media, but we are having thoughtful conversations about it behind the scenes. My frank conclusion, however, is that any faith-based organization seeking to engage in satire will sometimes need to bypass a funnier approach that its secular counterparts, such as The Onion, would pursue without hesitation.
That doesn’t mean we can’t be incredibly funny, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t speak truth to power in a biting and mischievous way. It just means that we must value our audience—our neighbors—more than we value the joke.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.