Still reeling from a drop in ratings, attributed to their misplaced confidence in a Clinton victory in the US presidential election, America's three top-rated satire publications have initiated tentative merger talks in an effort to shore up their precarious fortunes.
"Our shared, albeit unwritten, mission statement has always been to craft fiction which is stranger than the truth," said Onion spokesgoof Herman T. Zwiebel. ("That's Zwiebel, not Zweibel, du bloeder Schweinehund!" he added as an aside.)
"This has never been easy," he continued, "but the recent mass display of stupidity we have witnessed here in America has rendered the task all but impossible."
"Agreed", added Pulitzer prize winning Spoof journalist Vlad Paylaw. "And, compounding the problem is a profusion of phoney news outlets who try to pass off their blatant lies as fact. Given their high degree of success, it is readily apparent that American audiences have ceased to discriminate between fact and fiction. How, in this environment, are satirists supposed to be able to carve out a niche for their perspectives?"
MAD Magazine spokestwit Alfred E. Newman answered this question with characteristic optimism: ""What? Me worry?"
