Funny News Headlines That Deserve Their Own Headline in the News

Let’s talk about the crime blotter first, because that’s where local journalism truly earns its keep. Somewhere out there, a woman allegedly trained squirrels to attack a specific ex-boyfriend, and I’ve thought about the logistics of that more than I’ve thought about my own retirement. How long does squirrel training take? Was there a curriculum? A man rode an alligator through a drive-thru for nuggets, and my first reaction wasn’t shock, it was “well, how else was he getting there.” That’s what this genre does to you. It recalibrates your entire sense of what’s possible, one mugshot at a time, and mine is now permanently recalibrated.

Then there’s the headline department, the reporters who felt genuinely compelled to inform the public that planes land at airports. I want to meet the editor who read that and said “print it.” I want to shake their hand. There’s an entire subgenre of journalism that exists purely to confirm things everyone already knew, delivered with the gravity of a war dispatch, and I find it soothing, honestly. In a confusing world, at least one newsroom is out there verifying that water remains wet. More at eleven. There’s always more at eleven.

And the live broadcast material might be my favorite lane, because live TV has no editing bay to save anyone. The anchor forced to report on a police sketch that looks exactly like him, playing it cool while an entire viewing audience does the math. The weather presenter beaming through the sunshine forecast seconds after the anchors finished a somber segment, a man contractually required to be cheerful regardless of what just aired. That guy is not paid enough. Nobody in these clips is paid enough. The broadcast must go on, and the broadcast is glorious.

Here’s my honest take on why this stuff outperforms scripted comedy: nobody involved is in on the joke. The squirrel trainer was serious. The headline writer was serious. The anchor next to his own police sketch was extremely serious. Comedy writers spend careers trying to manufacture that level of deadpan, and journalism produces it accidentally, daily, on deadline. You cannot write this material. You can only wait for it, and it always comes.

And I’ll say something almost sincere: the funny news is weirdly good for you. Regular news is a firehose of dread, and then, wedged between the dread, there’s a man who broke into a burger place and drank the frying oil, and for one moment the world feels less like a crisis and more like a very long, very strange neighborhood. That’s a public service. Nobody planned it, which, by now, you’ll recognize as the theme.

The tape rolled. The anchor survived. More at eleven, always.