Tear Jerker / The Onion

For a satirical site, The Onion posts a lot of depressing articles.

• "Daddy Put In Bye-Bye Box". It's a story about a father's death from the perspective of children too young to comprehend what death means. Their mother is heartbroken over her husband's passing, and the realization of what happened will likely hit the children extremely hard.
• Pretty much every article that was written in the aftermath of 9/11 counts, but some of the best examples would be:
  • "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule", in particular the closing paragraph:
    "Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept."
  • "Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake," also written in response to 9/11. It reflects the reactions of a lot of people that day very accurately.
    "I baked a cake," said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. "I made it into a flag."
    Pearson and the Overstreets stared at the cake in silence for nearly a minute, until Cassie hugged Pearson.
    "It's beautiful," Cassie said. "The cake is beautiful."
• "New Mommy A Lot Prettier" is one for Joan, the first wife. Her husband leaves her for a younger woman, with the three-month gap between the divorce and the remarriage making it obvious he was cheating on her. Joan is desperate to make ends meet, working two 30-hour-a-week jobs. While she tries to be a responsible parent to her children, it ends up being for naught, as the kids' father and stepmother spoil them, causing her children to turn away from her. Even worse, her children show her No Sympathy for her being exhausted and sad, expressing a preference for their younger and prettier stepmother.

• US Commemorates 9/11 By Toasting Stable Afghan Government. If only that was real...
  • Kelly's cartoon that day was surprisingly poignant too. He usually employs some measure of Media Scaremongering, but this one was just a man dressed in patriotic apparel looking sadly at a box of props and asking "When is it okay to laugh again"?
  Kelly: Or is it too soon to ask?

• "Best Part Of Gay 12-Year-Old’s Day Half Hour Spent Eating Lunch Alone On Staircase." Even sadder when you watch the video accompanying the article, which ends on the kid sitting alone humming a little tune as he eats his lunch.

• "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports" A response to the December 2012 Connecticut school shooting. A rare occasion when Cluster F-Bomb can be used emotionally. You can tell that whoever wrote it wasn't in a funny mood.

• "Child Who Just Lost Balloon Begins Lifelong Battle With Depression"
  "No, the balloon," said Tremont, who as an adult will work with his physician and several psychiatrists to find a suitable combination of anxiolytic and psychotropic medicines to quell the disease's debilitating symptoms, ultimately turning into an over-medicated and unresponsive husk. "It's flying away."
  "Come back," added the toddler who will never feel entirely happy or normal again.

• "Ugly Girl Killed": In a dark parody of Missing White Woman Syndrome, a little girl named Edith Pelphrey is brutally murdered but nobody cares because she was not cute, and the residents of her hometown are more interested in the pre-teen beauty pageant "a contest that Edith, had she lived, surely could never have entered, let alone won."

• 97 Year Old Dies Unaware Of Being Violin Prodigy. The idea of being so uncommonly gifted and never finding out is incredibly depressing.
• Area Man Growing A Little Tired of Rushing Home to Hug Loved Ones
  At press time, Sifton was telling his children something like this would never happen again, a practice he has mastered over the past six months.

• 12 Year-old's Christmas List Demonstrates Heartbreaking Awareness Of Family's Financial Predicament. This is sad for people who've gone through tough times before, and parents who who've felt guilty they couldn't provide somethings for their kids.

• Kids Love When Mom Sad Enough To Just Order Pizza For ANYONE with severe clinical depression, this one is already heartbreaking. But for anyone who also has a mother suffering from the same disorder and has actually witnessed this, it becomes almost unreadable. There is absolutely NOTHING funny about this one.

• The Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice review where the reviewer compares watching two iconic heroes fighting to watching his parents' marriage collapse.

• Nation Begs Disaffected Youth Gravitating Toward Neo-Nazism To Get High And Play Xbox Instead. It's still a funny article, though it just screams with the desperation of loved ones not wanting youth to turn to evil to just do anything else, even things they would normally look down at you on, that your eyes just start stinging.
• 'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens This article was first published after the mass shooting that happened at Isla Vista, California. More than 20 articles with the same title have been published throughout the past several years. The reprinted article changes the photo, the details of the location and other details but the article remains the same. The Other Wiki lists how many times the article has been posted on the site. The repeating story shows how very little has changed since the last attack and that nothing has been done to solve the issue. This is a case of a Running Gag that many people want to be Running Gagged.
  • After the Valentine's Day shooting in Parkland, Florida, (which was covered in one of the repeated articles) the original author of the infamous headline revealed the school was a mile away from his house.
  • After the shooting in El Paso in the beginning of August 2019, another shooting occurred at Dayton, Ohio less than 24 hours after the previous one. To emphasize the point of the frequency of such shootings, the article was reprinted twice within minutes of each other with the details of the separate events^note  and then it happened again on June 6, 2022 in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  • And to hammer the point home even more, a follow-up article based on an out-of-context quotation favored by militant gun owners and self-proclaimed 'patriots': Thomas Jefferson: 'The Tree Of Liberty Must Be Refreshed From Time To Time With The Blood Of Patriots And Tyrants And Kindergarteners And Newlyweds And High-Schoolers And Parents And Teachers And Worshippers And Workers And Occasionally Infants'
  • After the Robb Elementary School shooting, they just blanketed their entire homepage with links to the articles.

• The Onion review of Finding Dory, which turns into a poignant commentary on society's failure to care for the disabled.

• "Report: Make It Stop" is "No Way"'s more recent, more random cousin, consisting solely of four images alluding to recent "insane" events followed by the closest thing so far to the Onion just giving up. By 2019, many felt the same way.
  At press time, sources confirmed that they knew deep down it was never going to stop.
• "Black Father Gives Son 'The Talk' about Holding Literally Any Object". Written in response to police killings like Stephon Clark, who was gunned down because he was holding a cell phone that was mistaken for a gun.
• "Woman Nervously Reaches For Cell Phone As Suspicious Black Man Tells Her Today's Soup Is Minestrone". The article ends with the cops "[pulling] their firearms and [slamming] the suspect onto a table after he produced a threatening packet of oyster crackers."
• "Man Surprised By How Often He Still Uses Bullying Skills He Learned In High School". An unusual case in that you feel sorry not for the Villain Protagonist, but for the people he mistreats without regret.
• "Area Man Fantasized About For One And Only Time in His Life".. If you're someone whose found themselves dealing with feelings of loneliness, this one is very close to home.

• "Loved Ones Recall Local Man's Cowardly Battle With Cancer". Russ Kunkel may not be a good person, but he doesn't necessarily deserve the hand he's been dealt, and it goes to show that not every terminally ill person can Face Death with Dignity.

• This edition of In the Know has the topic of debate "Should unemployed people be buying Apple computers?" Despite the other commentators repeatedly pulling the subject away from that and towards other related topics, Lauralee Hickok keeps trying to make the valid point of why the unemployed would even need to keep buying new Apple products if their old computers still work fine, citing it as being part of the overspending that led to the Great Recession. Despite her argument making sense, the other commentators stop her and tell her she's contributing nothing of value, before the moderator asks her to leave. Lauralee just sits in Stunned Silence for a few seconds before quietly muttering "OK", sounding as though she's on the verge of tears.
• "Man Dies After Long And Painful Battle With Life" is a depressing story of a painful and unfulfilling life.

• "45-Year-Old Loser Moves In With Parents" consists of a single image- a mausoleum, implying that the man died relatively young at 45, and lost his parents at some point in the past.

• "Firefighter Died To Save Unimpressive Teen": It's hard to watch the anchors telling the teen that You Should Have Died Instead, when she simply wants to get on with her life and live a good life, painfully aware that she can't live up to the example set by the man who died to save her.
• Man Who Thought He'd Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit Of Hope He Didn't Even Know He Still Had. Though it was originally written twenty years earlier, it was reposted to Twitter to mark six months of the Covid Pandemic, and...yeah. Those who actually read the article before retweeting were not disappointed, if they hoped for a soul-crushing story. A hopeless loser receives a letter from an unfamiliar address, sets it aside to read later, goes to work, realizes the letter's from an old friend, goes back home, opens it...and it's actually German authorities asking him if he knows the relatives of the friend, who died in a fire.
• "Animator Misses The Birth Of His Child So Mr. Incredible Could Have Consistently Sized Penis Bulge" is depressing enough, but it gets worse with the final line. Not only did the man's wife leave him, but apparently, he doesn't even know where his ex-wife and their son are living.
• Person Who Will One Day Become Warlord-Ruler Of What Was Once Nebraska Born In Omaha Hospital. The last line is absolutely heartbreaking:
  "He's our little angel," said his mother, whose corpse the warlord will disinter and fruitlessly attempt to reanimate with cybernetic technology in a desperate effort to reconnect with his youth, revealing the only shred of humanity left in his otherwise cold and pitiless heart. "We're just so blessed to have him."
• Nigeria May Be A Developing Nation, But It Is Rich In Culture vs. Get Me Out Of This Godforsaken Hellhole. The second opinion is gut-wrenching, it makes you feel for the guy who wrote it. While yes, this article is fake, the world has many many millions of people who live in conditions like this in corrupt third-world countries.
• The Onion's Review of Wonder Woman 1984 starts off being hilarious, with the gag of the reviewer having been in a coma for all of the 80s. It takes a sad turn near the end, when he laments not getting to see his daughter grow up. The review ends with him talking about his wife's attempt to kill him with a pillow.