The Onion – subtitled 'America's finest news source' – is without doubt the most popular comedy website in the world, setting the standard by which most other sites judge themselves. It transfers to the web the hallmark of a select line of past TV successes which satirise both the medium and the message.

It started out in 1988 as a magazine in Madison, Wisconsin but its meteoric rise came when it went online in 1996. The design and format is a pastiche of an Internet news website, such as Yahoo or the BBC and content is regularly updated. The writing is constantly of the highest quality – though for Brits the references are not always immediately obvious and perhaps it's beginning to look a little bit corporate.

But the test of brilliant satire comes when the news is really bad. Finding the right target of that story to make a point without resorting to lazy gags, it can be oh-so-easy to descend into tastelessness. The other option is to pretend that the event didn't happen.

So in the days following 11 September, no one would have blamed The Onion for 'opting out' but instead it had the following articles:

Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell 'We Expected Eternal Paradise For This,' Say Suicide Bombers – President Urges Calm And Restraint Among Nation's Ballad Singers – Hugging Up 76,000 Percent

Spot-on and hilarious – five million visitors a month can't be wrong.