The third edition of Peeling The Onion covers the book that did for encyclopedias what Our Dumb World did for atlases and what Our Dumb Century did for newspaper history books: The Onion’s Book of Known Knowledge.

I think this book was a little more hit-or-miss than the other too but still has plenty of hits. It seemed to me its comedic style was more absurdist than the other too; I was wondering if the book’s style was influenced by John Hodgman’s Complete World Knowledge trilogy. The book is alphabetized by all 27 letters(they made one up for the book), each with a little box about it(my favorite was the one for Y). The book gets a lot of humor out of mundane things; the entry for “napkin” covers a whole page.

One thing I really liked about it is that I like when The Onion gets sinister, and this book really ups the ante on that. The Onion’s motto(“Tu Stultus Es”) may be Latin for “you are dumb” but this book makes its contempt for its readers even clearer, and T. Herman Zweibel becomes a full-on supervillain. The book’s opening pages outline The Onion’s plans to establish its own knowledge center in every town in the world, and the book ends with “COPYRIGHT NOTICE: For the publication of this encyclopedia, The Onion has acquired the rights to all knowledge, past and present, and thus any future written or published words, sentences, thought fragments, scientific works, metaphors, or images containing any information whatsoever must be first cleared and licensed with The Onion.” There’s also a sinister sci-fi subplot running throughout the book

Speaking of which: remember when The Onion did that issue from the year 2056 or that news video from the year 2137? If they ever do another book(and that’s a possibility now that they’re run by people who actually give a crap) I’d like it to be a book full of that kind of material, a sort of history/encyclopedia of the future. They could call it Our Dumb Future.