Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always been fascinated by bullshit. Telling the truth was easy, any idiot can do that. Likewise, it doesn’t take much effort to simply lie about something. But bullshit… bullshit was an artform. True bullshit was something so far outside the bounds of credibility that it takes on a sort of weird Bizarro-credibility all it’s own, something so outlandish and unlikely that it almost seemed true. It’s always been around, from urban legends to folk beliefs, from chain letters to insane celebrity  rumours. I spent a lot of my childhood obsessed with bullshit in various shapes and forms, so I guess it was kind of inevitable that I’d eventually stumble across the Weekly World News.




You probably know the Weekly World News already, either firsthand or through references… Basically, you know the tabloids that always appear in cartoons with headlines like ‘Elvis Is Carrying Bigfoot’s Hairy Love Child’? Well, that’s basically the Weekly World News: bizarre and weirdly compelling stories about aliens, mythical creatures, science gone wrong, Worlds Fattest _____, ghosts, demons,vengeful gods, insane housewives, and how the face of Christ appeared in an Iowan child’s burger bun (“It was uncanny”, said Bobby McVittles, 8, “He stared right into my soul and bled tears of ketchup”). It was garish and crude and appealed straight to the lowest possible denominator, so I read it religiously all through my childhood. At first I just thought it was stupid in a funny way, but later I actually grew to appreciate the sense of craft and workmanship in it, the little touches that made the whole thing so fun in the first place. There were the carefully composed headlines, which I always thought of as the ‘hook and twist’: First they had something dramatic in big eyecatching letters (“Aliens spotted in Washington DC!”), which was the hook, and then in smaller font there was the twist (“…and they stole Abe Lincoln’s corpse!”). Another thing was the cast of reoccurring stock characters in the stories, like Bemused Local, Stern Cop, and my personal favorite, Baffled Scientist. Best of all, there were the covers: headlines like ‘Saddam And Osama Adopt Shaved Ape Baby’ were so wonderfully concise and elegant that you hardly needed to read the story at all, like some kind of mutated haiku poetry or something.



But the most interesting parts to me were the early issues (which would be reprinted every so often) and the small column-filler aticles. Both of them took a less sensationalistic, less tongue-in-cheek approach to things, and were much more interesting because of it. If the Weekly World News had just been ‘Giant Moths Attack Paris’ over and over then I probably would have grown bored of it quite quickly, but it was those smaller, more restrained articles that kept pulling me back, that fed into my love of bullshit. They were masterworks in exploiting that huge weakness of the human mind, the idea of it could happen. Maybe you could win the lottery, despite all the odds against it. Maybe Roy Orbison really did snort pure cocaine off Mama Cass’s tits while fisting a newborn goat, before writing about the whole thing in ‘Blue Bayou’. It could happen, and there had to be a grain of truth in there somewhere, right? The Weekly World News knew this, and used it at every opportunity to make some of the most weirdly beguiling stories ever written… Stories like this one: http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/head-explode.html . Now, that didn’t happen. There’s no way that could possibly have ever happened. But that doesn’t stop the little voice at the back of your mind from feeling a slight twinge of uncertainty... After all, stranger things have happened, right? It didn’t help that some of the stories they included were actually true, either, and would occasionally turn up on TV or in a more respectable newspaper.



There was also the matter of the Weekly World News’s readership: namely, just how many people actually took the whole thing at face value? Was the paper aimed at irony-loving suburbanites or at genuinely clueless rednecks in Cornhole, Arkansas? I’d always assumed that it was the latter, but looking back at it now I’m not so sure. After all, some of the stories were so obviously faked that no-one could ever really believe them, right? Maybe the idea of the squirrel-eating, eight-toed hillbilly earnestly gazing at pictures of Bigfoot and Elvis was just one carefully manufactured by the paper itself, a way to keep people reading in a state of smug self-satisfaction. Or maybe some people really are stupid enough to believe it. I don’t know, and to be honest I’m not sure if I want to, since the answer would probably depress me either way. But that’s part of the appeal of the whole thing to me: just another part of the web of pure, unadulterated bullshit that surrounds every aspect of the paper.



The Weekly World News was cancelled last year, after years of dull, tired stories about the same things over and over (“Bat Boy Tracks Osama! Worlds Fattest Man Eats Worlds Fattest Cat!”). It now exists only as a website, which still updates occasionally. It’s for the best, I guess… The WWN went out with at least some of its legacy intact, and it was assimilated into its logical successor: the internet, a mass of unsubstantiated rumours, hysterical pseudoscience, and doctored photos on a scale the world has never seen before. The Weekly World News is dead, but its spirit of strangely convincing bullshit lives on, and I find that a comforting thought: no matter what happens, in one way or another, there'll always be a Bat Boy.