“Our Dumb World” just got a little smarter

Chad Nackers and Joe Randazzo, a couple of the guys responsible for the Onion’s latest literary effort, “Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas Of The Planet Earth (Seventy-Third Edition)” (Little Brown, $27.99), showed up out of the blue this evening at Skylight Books in Los Feliz and started imposing this educational slide show about the globe on the store’s patrons. It was terrifying.

Suffice it to say, “Our Dumb World” – an exhaustive (if not always accurate), country-by-country evisceration of our fair planet – finds multiple ways to find even African genocide funny, so it probably belongs on your bookshelf or coffee table.

Afterwards, during the Q&A (first question: “Who are you guys and why did you just try to educate us?”), Nackers and Randazzo estimated that the Onion staff wrote somewhere around 400,000 jokes for the book, in addition to maintaining their popular satirical website. (I think about 300,000 of those jokes survived to make it into the book – really, there’s a gag on virtually every square inch of every page of the book (except, you know, the endpages, the title page and the page with all the publishing information on it) (they contend only about 35,000 jokes made it into print).)

Other fun facts:

* The Onion’s first book of original material, “Our Dumb Century,” an inspired stroll down the 20th century’s memory lane, was originally going to be published by Hyperion, a Disney imprimatur. Until, that is, their editors censored about 75% of the book – anything political, anything about sex, anything about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen, etc.

* Believe it or not, a few topics can be in such bad taste that the Onion won’t even go there, or their lawyers won’t let them.

One story that never made it online: A report on how when “To Catch A Predator’s” Chris Matthews enters a nominally popular national chain restaurant, everyone inside, patrons and employees alike, flee in terror. As hilarious as it sounds, lawyers nonetheless killed this one out of fear of legal reprisals from said restaurant chain. (And yes, they said which restaurant chain.)

Two other stories that did run were eventually deleted from the Onion’s online archives when the celebrities parodied in them – Janet Jackson and Michael Bay, respectively – got huffy.

Anyway, the point of all this is that they seem like a couple of decent guys and their book is funny, so you should buy it. Unless you're poor, in which case save your money.