Department of Can’t Make This Stuff Up: the ‘Washington Post’ out-Onions The Onion?

The setup is this: Frist, in his off-hours from the Senate -- so nice to have time for a hobby; good to know Senatoring isn’t too demanding -- attends to the medical care of gorillas at the National Zoo. No, really:

He pressed his stethoscope to the gorilla's chest and narrowed his eyes. Kuja, a silverback patriarch, was breathing isofluorine. He was the Senate majority leader of the gorillas, who negotiated disputes, back-slapped the ape boys and owned exclusive mating rights with the females.

Oh. My. God. Does the Washington Post mean to say that the Senate majority leader has his pick of the females? In all of Washington? Or only in the Senate?

"When you're this close, you feel this kind of oneness with them," Frist said. The stink of ape sweat and gorilla testosterone soaked his hair and clothes....

Oh, ewwww.

At 9:30 a.m., Frist opened the Senate, gripping the corners of the lectern, as he had the operating table. Across the city, rolling in a bed of hay, Kuja opened his eyes and grunted. The gorilla kept touching his tongue to his tooth. Something had changed inside of the beast while he slept. Frist smiled and spoke unremarkably from the lectern, reeking of silverback testosterone.

Oh, double ewwww. The floor of the Senate smells like a monkey house?

You couldn’t, you just couldn’t invent something like this even as a joke. And the Post offered it with a straight face. I laughed, and yet I wept, too, because I figured, This is it -- the real world is well and truly so far beyond satire that there is no going back.

And then I checked out this week’s issue of The Onion.

Now, I used to read The Onion religiously, but I stopped a while back because the writers simply have not been able to effectively satirize politics or entertainment or sports or anything. Sure, they got in a couple zingers here and there, but nothing they’ve published in literally years has shocked me or made me question their sense of propriety at the same time it made me laugh. I feel it is the job of institutions like The Onion to shock and to push the bounds of good taste and I wanted to see that, but real life has been so damn effective at being shocking and tasteless lately that real life has been hard to beat.

But this week, there’s this:

Passengers Bravely Take Down Plane Showing Big Momma's House 2

WASHINGTON, DC—The Federal Aviation Administration announced today that United Airlines Flight 43, which crashed outside Parkersburg, WV last Thursday, was in fact brought down by passengers who voluntarily sacrificed their lives in order to prevent the screening of the in-flight movie selection, Big Momma's House 2.

All 105 people onboard died in the crash.

"As we examine the passengers' cell-phone calls and flight recordings, we get a sense of the incredible courage displayed by these ordinary men and women," said FAA Administrator Marion Blakey at a press conference Monday, during which excerpts from the recordings were played. "They acted in the only way they could to stop this unspeakable horror starring Martin Lawrence as an FBI agent who goes undercover as a nanny for a sexy murder suspect."

The Onion itself wondered whether “Gen X Irony, Cynicism May Be Permanently Obsolete” in its first issue after 9/11. Looks like it just too an extended vacation.

(Technorati tags: Bill Frist, Washington Post, The Onion, satire)