The Onion, the satirical publication self-styled as “America’s finest news source,” was recently purchased by a group that includes former NBC reporter Ben Collins, one of the most humorless progressive journalists on social media, who became CEO. This has, predictably, led to very unfunny content. The thread of posts on X during the Trump trial in New York is Exhibit A. Click here to read, if you want to not laugh.

It can be tempting to portray this as the libs taking over and ruining something else, but that’s not really what’s going on here. The Onion was always run by libs, but it used to be funny sometimes. The funniest articles, though, were never especially timely or newsy. When it tried to be timely, it was usually to parrot the progressive line on some policy issue, such as gun control. The funniest Onion articles fell into a few different categories, and they were never the kind of thing you could live-tweet as a news event was happening.

I always enjoyed the ones that were just surrealist humor. For example:

Funny stories about current events wouldn’t be trying to make a political point, but rather would make fun of some other aspect of the event:

Smart, concise wordplay, such as:

Observational comedy about elements of American culture, such as:

Stories on ordinary people and events that would never be actual news, but written in the journalistic style:

And their running gag portraying then-Vice President Joe Biden as a weird-uncle character produced many great articles:

Some of these stories involved political figures or events, but they weren’t political humor, really. That was never what made the Onion funny. It was the weird stuff that made you stop and think a second before laughing, and then reading further to laugh some more, and then going back and re-reading it out loud to friends, struggling to get through the piece without cracking up.