Farewell, Bat Boy | Salon Life — The crackpot World Weekly News has been supplanted by the Onion with its more obvious humor. In fact the WWN had extremely high-end humor with compelling ideas. I’ve always advised newbie writers regarding headline writing that the WWN was a source of great examples.
I often described my job, without a hint of exaggeration, as “thinking of the stupidest shit possible.” I once pitched a story positing that the U.S. government had data confirming that the one commonality linking all mass killers, including the Columbine shooters, was that they never masturbated. Rather than issue this report, which would save lives but promote onanism, the government preferred to let occasional slaughters take place. My editor rejected it on the grounds that it was “too plausible.”
