Sunday, September 19, 2010

That's horrible!... That's horrible.

So I'm reading The Onion's Our Dumb World, a fairly comprehensive world atlas that just happens to be one big joke. Like most Onion material, it's very clever and very willing to make fun of pretty much anything. When you're looking for jokes to make about all the countries in the world, you end up with a lot of dark humor. In between the amusing little jabs at regional quirks, there are jokes, and plenty of them, about starvation, violence, disease, and any number of calamities that the sufferers themselves may not find very funny.

But here's the thing: although I'm certainly not reading for accuracy of information, the atlas is serving as a reminder that a heck of a lot of things are wrong with our world. I knew that already, of course, but seeing all at once how much fodder our sometimes-wonderful, sometimes-dumb world provides for tasteless humor makes now seem like a good time to help.

Humor works, is what I'm saying.

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