Web-crawlers and satire fans familiar with The Onion will appreciate the effort that went into the creation of “Our Dumb Century.”

The premise here is that the satirical newspaper, The Onion, was fictitiously founded in 1756 and has been documenting American history ever since.

This book does to our century what The Onion has been doing to current events. It puts an ungodly, funny, satirical spin on every major event of the last hundred years.

The collection of front pages begins with the very first Mercantile-Onion.

It contains an opinion piece declaring Benjamin Franklin to be a great ass whose most famous accomplishments include flying a child’s kite during a storm and inventing a stove while engaging in vile acts of carnality.

This is included in the introduction by T. Herman Zweibel, the 132-year-old publisher of The Onion, whose memory of the 20th century is sketchy. One thing he is certain of is that the wars in Europe he was informed of were a good thing.

“God-damn Europeans with their leathern short pants and their wooden-shoes and their keeping of billy goats upon the rooves of their houses. To hell with them all — they deserve one another!”

Starting with Jan. 1, 1900, the headlines read: “McKinley ushers in bold new ‘coal age,'” “Nation’s skies filled with beautiful, black smoke: Will man-made grime reach the very vault of heaven?” “Man with limbs employed by rail-road,” “Death-by-corset rates stabilize at one in six” and “Vatican condemns rhythm method.”

The Onion has always been funny and perceptive, a task that has never seemed like an impossible one to perform.

But these headlines and the accompanying stories feel as though they have been ripped straight from the pages of history.

One would be hard-pressed to believe that The Onion has not been around since before the founding of the United States.

It’s like “The Blair Witch Project” of satire. The uninitiated will have trouble deciding if this is serious or not.

Leave this book on your coffee table and someone will ask you if this book is for real or is it some kind of joke.

The pages have the look and sensibility of old newspaper headlines and stories.

Each decade’s stories are reported and ripped apart, turned inside out and given a wink and nod treatment that is so funny, readers will have to take a break lest they risk an aneurysm.

The Monday, Oct. 19, 1931, edition of The Onion announces the opening of the Empire State Building and reports that the building is “giant ape-proof.”

Other headlines include, “Banks to close early today; will reopen in 1936” and “Will Rogers meets a man he likes a little too much.”

Even the war years seem a bit more amusing with The Onion treatment.

In the Friday, Oct. 4, 1968 edition, the top story is “Hippies, NASA race for moon.” The story quotes sources from NASA and the hippie “freakonaut” program.

Whether the historical event in question is World War II (“Nagasaki bombed ‘just for the hell of it'”), the McCarthy hearings (“Morty and Betty Crocker executed for selling top-secret cake recipes to reds”) or nuclear threat (“Pentagon develops A-bomb-resistant desk: Schoolchildren now safe from atomic blast”), The Onion manages to capture it in full form.

The volume of stories alone is impressive. There are 164 pages of front-page headlines and each one has a detailed story taking the event in question to task.

Few trends are ignored.

If the world was stupid enough to do it, The Onion makes it appear that it was on top of it, ready to ridicule it mercilessly in its highly professional, deadpan style.

Whether you are a diehard fan or a have never even heard of The Onion, “Our Dumb Century” will delight and entertain you for hours.

5 star

Ratings based on a 5 star scale.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.