Our Dumb Century is a mock retrospective book by the writers of The Onion. It consists of fake Onion front pages that cover all the major events of the 20th century, from the year 1900 to the year 2000, with the design and layouts copying those of the newspapers of the time.
This book provides examples of:
- Absurdly-Long Limousine: "GM Unveils New '55 Cadillac Dreadnought", which rolls on eight wheels, seats twenty-four people, has three-foot-tall tail fins, and comes equipped with a dashboard-mounted martini mixer, basement, and optional three-season patio.
- Alternate History: Some articles have traits of this, such as Archduke Franz Ferdinand showing up alive after World War I, Richard Nixon refusing to resign and instead being arrested, sent to prison, breaking out, and going on a killing spree which leads to his being gunned down after an extensive manhunt, and the US not just losing The Vietnam War, but actually surrendering to them.
- American Eagle: Despite the name of the paper, it only adopted an onion as its logo in 1968. Before that, most versions were accompanied by an eagle.
- "Angry Black Man" Stereotype: "Malcolm X: 'I Also Have a Dream''I Have a Dream That One Day Little Black Children Will Beat the Living Crap out of Little White Children'
- Antiquated Linguistics: Utilized quite profusely in the earlier parts of the book.
- Art Evolution: Aside from the design of the paper itself, the logo of The Onion at the top of the page is repeatedly redesigned as the decades pass until it becomes the current one in the '90s.
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership: "Mussolini Becomes Italian Dictator After Closely Contested Fist-Fight"
- Banana Republic: "CIA Subdues Fruit-Hatted Peoples of Lesser Americas"
- Bank Toaster: During The Great Depression, Herbert Hoover introduces a Free Toaster Premium Initiative (bread not included) to boost confidence in the nation's banks.
- Big Ball of Violence: A map of Europe at the start of the Great War looks like one with all the arrows showing countries declaring war on each-other.
- Black Comedy Rape: Along with all the cartoons featuring Lady Liberty, there's also "US Troops Pull Out Of Vietnamese Peasant Girl".
- Blasphemous Boast: "John Lennon: 'I'm Higher Than Jesus Right Now'"
- Butt-Monkey: Richard Nixon is the most prominent one ("Should Nixon Be Brought Back to Kick Around Some More?", "Nixon Vetoes Federal Love and Happiness Act"), but Warren G. Harding doesn't even get articles, just two headlines: "Harding Elected, Forgotten About" and "President Harding Dies Several Months Ago"
- Candid Camera Prank: "Allen Funt Lets President In on Hilarious 'Cuban Missile Crisis' Prank"
- Chained to a Railway: An advertisement for a railroad claims that this happens less frequently on their railroad than on competing lines.
- Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: The French surrender ten minutes after Nazi Germany invades. They do it again when Pearl Harbor is bombed, and AGAIN when the Americans drop a different kind of bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Cluster F-Bomb:
- "Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon. Neil Armstrong's Historic First Words on Moon: 'Holy Living Fuck'"
- "Last Night's Fireside Chat Just a Stream of Cuss Words"
- Richard Nixon gives one during a shootout with police.
- Companion Cube: "President Ford's Pet Rock Dies", resulting in messages of condolence from other world leaders and "National Day of Bumming Declared"
- Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: "Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons" posits that every conspiracy theory about who assassinated John F. Kennedy was true simultaneously. A subhead reports, "President shot 129 times from 43 different angles".
- Creepy Crossdresser:"War Rationing Board Restricts Nylon Use to Armed Forces, J. Edgar Hoover Only"
Frilly Panties and Garters Especially Needed Now, FBI Director Says - Deliberate Values Dissonance: Aside from the blatant racism and sexism featured in the earlier pages, some headlines that mock specific ideas of the time are "Man Ventures Outside Hatless", "Surgeon General Warns Against Smoking Any Brand of Cigarette Other than Chesterfields" and "Secret Pac-Man Patterns Fall Into Russian Hands".
- Demonic Dummy: How Howdy Doody is written about.
- Another article describes how Charlie McCarthy went off script during a radio show, telling the audience they should kill themselves.
- Didn't Think This Through: "Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme"
- Does Not Know His Own Strength: "Cute Little Mouse Crushed To Death By Petting"
- Does This Remind You of Anything?:
- "Aristotle Onassis Killed by Lone Gunman in Athens Motorcade"
- The entire Watergate scandal, which instead plays out like the Gary Tison prison break, up to and including Nixon being gunned down by police outside of a Motel (Spiro Agnew still at large).
- Draco in Leather Pants: Invoked with "Armed Federal Agents Shoot, Kill Our Beloved Dillinger", which mentions how he was never rude to any of the people he robbed or murdered.
- Ear Worm: "Irving Berlin Publishes 1000th Annoying, Clamorous Ditty"
- Elvis Lives: "Elvis Dead; Is Elvis Alive?"
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Which gets Ralph Nader killed when test-driving one of the Trope Namers. He is memorialized with a sculpture of a Pinto with an eternal flame rising from its exploding engine.
- Expy: Little Orphan Maggie, an orphan girl acquired by T. Herman Zweibel.
- Failed Future Forecast: The iconic photo is on the back cover, altered with Truman holding a copy of The Onion with the headline "Other Guy Defeats What's-His-Face". A page of the book itself includes the correction that in fact, What's-His-Face defeated the Other Guy.
- Felony Misdemeanor: Tax evasion is the only heinous crime Al Capone is even accused of.
- For the Evulz: "Nagasaki Bombed 'Just For The Hell Of It'"
- Full-Boar Action: "McKinley Killed By Wild Boar"
- Goofy Print Underwear: During World War II, a cartoon shows the Statue of Liberty menaced by the Axis leaders. While Tojo is about to bash her head in with her tablet and Hitler is brandishing her torch menacingly, Mussolini is standing there with his hands on his hips and pants around his ankles, revealing his heart-spotted undershorts.
- Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die: "New President Assures Nation, 'The Only Thing We Have to Fear is a Crippling, Decade-Long Depression'"."'All is Lost', says 32nd President in Address to Nation; America Doomed
- Have a Gay Old Time: "Earth-Quake Marks Least Gay Day in San Francisco History"."Garment District Still Flaming"
- Heaven Above: A spoof headline from the week after the airplane was invented is about the government planning airplane expeditions to Heaven. The story reveals that within ten years, it will be possible for the average American to vacation there.
- Heroic Bystander:"Japanese Zeroes Held Off by Boy with Dick Tracy Decoder Ring"
- Hypocritical Humor: "Dastardly Japs Attack Colonially-Occupied US Non-State"
- I'm a Humanitarian: "Idi Amin Praises Former Ugandan Defense Minister As 'Delicious'"
- The Internet Is for Porn: "Computer-Industry Leaders Call For Creation Of Masturbation Superhighway"
- Karma Houdini: "Horrible Asshole Richer Than Ever"
- Kill Sat: "US Launches Orbiting Homeless Incinerator"
- King of the Homeless: There's a small article in 1932 about Herbert Hoover signing an accord with King Gus II, sovereign of all hobos. Also in attendance were the Duke and Duchess of Junkland, Emperor Lazlo of Trashville, and the ambassador to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
- Kissing In A Tree: "Ken Star Taunts Clinton With 'Sitting In A Tree' Song."
- The Klutz: "Gerald Ford Sworn In; Promises Awkwark, Bumbling Transition", in reference to that one time he fell down the stairs.
- MegaCorp: The final page, for the year 2000, includes the article "All Corporations Merge Into Omnicorp" which also assumes control of all world governments, just for convenience.
- Millennium Bug: "Planet Temporarily Closed Due To Computer Crash"
- Nuke 'em:
- "Nagasaki Bombed 'Just for the Hell of It'"
- "US Army Finds Last Place on Earth Untouched by War, Blows It to Hell"
- "H-Bomb Test a Success! Eniwetok Atoll Islanders Return to Their Home, a Mile-Wide Crater on the Ocean Floor"
- "Reagan Nukes Libya"
- Nostalgia Filter:
- The section dedicated to the years 1929 to 1946 is titled "Dust, Despair and Death: Those Were the Days". The title of the next one (1946-1963) is "The Swell Years", which are immediately followed by the years 1963 to 1981: "Peace, Love and Other Bullshit".
- Of Corpse He's Alive: "Roosevelt's Remains To Run For Fifth Term".
- Perilous Old Fool: Just as in real life, Theodore Roosevelt tried to enlist in the Army to fight WWI. In the article, he's accepted, but assigned to mess hall duty to keep him out of danger.
- Political Overcorrectness: One of the news stories is about an Iowa family being attacked for having only white members.
- Poor Communication Kills: All of World War I was caused by Archduke Ferdinand picking a horrible time to do some King Incognito and not tell anybody.
- Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Deconstructed in "Boy Bitten by Radioactive Spider Dies of Leukemia."
- Rasputinian Death: "Russians Continuing To Kill Rasputin" details how he was not only repeatedly stabbed, shot, and poisoned, but also run over by a train, electrocuted, dissolved in acid, set on fire, impaled with a cavalry spear, Buried Alive, beheaded twice and chopped into tiny pieces, but still refused to die.
- Real Dreams are Weirder: "Martin Luther King Jr.: 'I Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night'", in which he meets Jackie Gleason and is threatened by a giant roll of paper towels, among other nonsense.
- Red Scare:
- Retraux: Despite The Onion having been founded in 1988, all the pre-'80s newspapers shown in the book have period-accurate typefaces and layouts that reflect the style of the time they're supposedly from.
- Running Gag:
- A number of major trials are referred to as the "Trial of the Century."
- There's also the running gag of cartoons featuring Lady Liberty being sexually assaulted by "The Wretched Spaniard", "The Hun", a Lounge Lizard, a "Capitalist Plutocrat Bastard" ("I've raped everything else in sight, why not you too, Sister?"), Benito Mussolini, Nikita Khrushchev, a dirty hippie, and an Arab terrorist.
- During World War II, the French kept surrendering.
- Self-Abuse: There is an advertisement for an "Anti-Masturbation Harness and Genital Pouch" that not only locks away the manly parts, but also includes a blade to discourage erections.
- Shoe Phone: "Alger Hiss Evades Capture with Secret Evapo-Spy Wristwatch; Rep. Nixon's Emergency Jet-Pack Ambush Fails"
- Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle:
- T. Herman Zweibel's introduction to the book contains a picture of the earliest existing issue of The Onion, which is titled: "The Mercantile-Onion. Being a Helpful Chronicle and Digeſt of Publick Events of Significant Note, and Well-Found'd Advices, &c., for the General Enlightenment of Letter'd Yankees."
- This has been simplified to "The Best Source of News-worthy Items in our Great Republic"note by the 1900s, and gets shorter and shorter as the decades pass:1913: The Best Source of News in Our Great Republic
1922: Finest Source of News in Our Great Republic
1928: Finest Source of News in America
1950: Finest News Source in America
1968: Finest American News Source
1981: America's Finest News Sourcenote
1998: America's News Source
- Shout-Out: "Do you have yesterday's newspaper, an extra bootlace, and some grass?"
- Shown Their Work: The newsprint style of each individual decade is painstakingly reproduced. There are also lots of period-accurate historical and literary references.
- Situational Sexuality: "Let's Work Together to Pretend Our War-Time Homosexual Experiences Never Happened"
- The Space Race:
- "Bleeping Two-Foot Tin Ball Threatens Free World; America Suffers Major Defeat in Space-Gizmo Race"
- "Outer Space Falls to Communists; Russian Man is First in Orbit"
- "HOLY SHIT; MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON"
- Stay in the Kitchen: "War Department Gears Up To Fire 3 Million Women"
- Subliminal Seduction: "Bing Crosby Record Reveals Secret Message When Played Backward: 'Have a Swell Day, Ladies and Gents'"
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: "Nothing Going On In New Mexico""Top Physicists 'Just Camping' Say Army Intelligence Officials"
- Take That!: An article about Peter Parker's death by leukemia, noting that it's the sixth radiation-related death in the past month, following Reed Richards and his crew and Bruce Banner.
- The Treachery of Images: "Giant Poster of Mao Seizes Power In China"
- Tutti Frutti Hat: When talking about a Banana Republic: "CIA Subdues Fruit-Hatted Peoples of Lesser Americas"
- Very Special Episode: "Nancy Reagan Ends Nation's Drug Problem with Very Special Diff'rent Strokes Appearance""Youths, Addicts Learn They Can 'Just Say No'"
- Waxing Lyrical: "US Navy Intelligence Reports 'There Is Nothing Like A Dame'""Nothing Looks Like A Dame, There's No Books Like A Dame"
- Who Shot JFK?: Parodied in "Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles".
- Then all 70+ suspects were shot outside the courtroom by Jack Ruby, leaving the whole thing a mystery.
- A headline in the next issue is "Warren Commission Admits to Killing JFK".
- Worst News Judgment Ever: "Death of 500,000 Somalis Momentarily Distracts Nation from Dream Team Excitement"
- "President Harding Dies Several Months Ago"
- You Have Failed Me: "God Kills Oral Roberts For Fundraising Shortfall", referencing the televangelist's real statement that the Lord would "call him home" if he couldn't raise a particular sum of money by the end of the year.
