satire

Hey look, we all experience brain farts from time to time, so we can't be too judgmental of the following people who unfortunately happened to have their snafus captured for snarky Reddit audiences to prey on.

The Onion has been dishing out satire since 1988. That's over thirty years. While they may have ceased to distribute an actual paper, their hilarious articles are very much in existence in the digital universe. And there are still stupid people who believe their (mostly) obvious joke headlines. 

Lately it feels like reality has become so unhinged and unbelievable that it's sometimes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. On the other hand, some people are so eager to be outraged that they've lost the ability to recognize satire all together. Come on, everyone should know what The Onion is by now, right? Millennials: maybe it's time to educate that grandparent who uses facebook without supervision. Though, to be fair to all the grannies out there, even People Magazine and the President of the United States fell for some pretty obvious satire.

Although these painful woosh moments are mad entertaining, you gotta feel bad for some of these people—they go through life thinking the world is even more psychotic than it already is.

People on the internet seem to have the answer for everything. Influencers share exactly how much water you have to drink (with lemon, of course) to be healthy, parents share clever ways to manipulate children, and wannabe financial geniuses always seem to have hacks to help people game the system. And then there are these jokesters. While we can't argue that they're totally wrong, these little life hacks are an unholy combination of bad advice and good humor. And we're totally here for it. 

We feel sort of bad for these poor, gullible individuals who devoured satirical headlines from The Onion, but at the same time, they're providing us with a lot of entertainment, so we'll take it.

We've all been through those angsty teen phases where fluctuations in hormones bring out the cringe in us. When I was 14, my worst display of teen angst was probably hiding in the bathroom during class to write poetry about being misunderstood. These days, the internet makes it much easier to embarrass ourselves by instantly oversharing and posting deep memes about the ills of society. But honestly, we're pretty into the 'deep' pseudo-philosophical cringe. Give us all the profound joker image macros and 'we live in a society' platitudes, because we think they're freakin' hilarious. 

We've got some great examples of cringey deep posts that were shared in earnest and self-reflexive memes that satirize the angsty teen voice.

We don't want to come at people too harshly for getting wooshed by ambiguous jokes or falling for a fake headline that sounds like it could be totally real, but everyone should know what The Onion is by now. Most satirical news publications these days have the words satire, or fake, or not real news written somewhere to make the joke totally fool-proof. Well, never underestimate a fool.

We've got a bunch of great examples of times people fell for satire and 'ate the onion,' so to speak. 

We all know that one person on Instagram who incessantly posts motivational platitudes about the importance of self-care on a pastel background, or clickbait articles that offer half-assed life hacks to everyday obstacles. We've got a bunch of chaotic and tongue-in-cheek memes and tweets that make fun of these clichés by offering terrible advice. No one should actually take these sarcastic pro tips seriously, but they sure are useful if you need a good laugh!

Stereotypes can often be hurtful and offensive, but satirical 'starter pack' memes that make generalizations about extremely specific interest groups are pretty damn funny. Some of them are so specified, that imagining the personal beef someone must have had to make the meme in the first place is amusing in itself. Take a look at some fresh examples we gathered from r/starterpacks.

Do you take pleasure in converting old doors into coffee tables or old coffee tables into pallets? Do you spend a lot of time carefully crafting email responses? Does grabbing a beer or two at the local Chili's after a Sunday at Home Depot sound appealing to you? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you might get a kick out of these neat memes by novelty memelord @middleclassfancy. We're big fans of this hilarious account and love to share these tongue-in-cheek gems every chance we get.

It's nearly impossible to avoid mentions of Netflix' Emily In Paris as of late. The series was released on October 2, and pretty much everyone on Twitter has an opinion about the show. The series follows Emily Cooper, an American who's just relocated to Paris for a job with a French marketing company. Emily, who is played by Lily Collins, is pretty, perky, and is also a terrible (and terribly on-point) caricature of the way Americans behave in foreign countries. 

Emily routinely rejects French culture, scoffing at everything from cliche French smoking habits to simply dining out. This pompous attitude has been widely criticized in the media, for good reason. Instead of trying to accept the ways of her new city, she seems to turn her nose up at it, consistently mocking customs that are really pretty benign.

This superior attitude is marvelously called out by a brilliant new Instagram account, @emilyinparasite. The page mixes cringey images of Emily Cooper with stills from Bong Joon-ho's Parasite. The film, a social satire that highlights class discrimination, is a perfect foil for Cooper's character. The photoshopped images make for some truly unhinged commentary. We've included their latest spicy posts, but we implore you to follow for more brilliant content.

If you spend way too much time on the internet like we do, you've probably heard about the 'flat earth' theory, but what do you know about dinosaur earth? Two years ago, an Instagram account called @dinosaurearth began posting memes that satirize the flat earth mindset and they've been going hard ever since. The concept is reminiscent of the first well-known internet trolls of belief systems, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The 'Dinosaur Earth Society' also have a Twitter account, where they often flaunt their rivalry with @FlatEarthOrg. As meme savants, we have deep respect for @dinosaurearth's dedication to throwing their spin on nearly every meme format in existence. We've put together twenty-one of the funniest @dinosaurearth posts for the (dinosaur) world to see. 

Normally we think it's wrong to make fun of people's misfortunes, but these moments of incredible obliviousness were just too good to pass up. So scroll down to see some instances of people not quite understanding obvious jokes, and then click here for more "Ate The Onion" moments!

If you're ever feeling bad about yourself, just take a stroll through the following posts from people who missed very obvious jokes. We're pretty sure they'll boost your self-confidence. Check out /r/woooosh for more cringe material!