The Onion takes on The Clock

Even King Lear, William Shakespeare’s great dark bleak tragedy, had a clown—someone to deliver a little humor to lighten the mood and relieve the tension. And sometimes the fool is the voice of reason.

So, it’s no surprise that The Washington Post just published “How the world’s cartoonists are skewering the Trump vs Kim war of words.”

And it’s probably no coincidence that late-night comedians have proven to be some of the most astute critics around, writes the Columbia Journalism Review—an observation echoed by the New York Times in its article on Monday titled “Colbert, Kimmel and the politics of late night.” Nothing is too risky to tackle: health care, taxes—even NFL football. (!)

And nuclear weapons are not immune. The Onion just published a headline yesterday called “Doomsday Clock excited to hear what its chime sounds like.”

Appropriately enough, it was in the form of a tweet.

In fact, the clock has been in the news a lot lately, including publications located as far apart as Sydney and Manhattan. The Chicago Tribune published a cartoon about the Clock, as did The Daily Signal— published by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.

And the concepts embodied by the Clock even made it into such unexpected publications as Teen Vogue, which recently published “What you should know about North Korea and nuclear weapons threats.” (Teen Vogue, incidentally, has been earning a lot of respect lately from media outlets such as the BBC for its hard-hitting, issues-oriented journalism.)

But probably the best commentary about the clock came from Fast Company, which titled a recent story: “Does the history of the Doomsday Clock make you feel better or worse about right now?”