My Top Ten The Babylon Bee Articles

A ranked list of the favorite articles I wrote

A “Babylon bee” as rendered by MidJourney.

I left The Babylon Bee at the end of 2021. I decided to do a round-up of my favorite articles I wrote for them, but I had written many more than I thought — approximately 666 of them. So what I thought would be one post ended up being thirteen posts long and together highlighted 141 of my articles I thought were particularly good.

So let’s get to the brass tacks: What are the absolute best articles I wrote? So, I went through and picked out what I consider my ten best articles. These aren’t necessarily the most popular articles I wrote; they’re my favorite. The ones I think back to the most.

My Top Ten The Babylon Bee Articles

10. Study: Average American Now Complains More In A Week Than People Living Through The Black Plague Did Their Entire Lives

There are a few articles where I realized I was constantly repitching the same thing, and this is one of them. People are constantly complaining — acting like they live in the worst time in history despite having advantages and luxuries the richest kings from hundreds of years ago couldn’t dream of. A little more gratitude would change the world, but that’s asking for the moon.

9. Study: Hate Clicks Are A Major Source Of Web Traffic And Also 'The Princess Bride' Is A Trash Movie That Only Stupid People Like

One of my favorite things is arguing two disparate things simultaneously — it’s a fun little juggling act. I did that also in an early successful Bee article Report: Millennials More Open To Socialism, Touching Hot Stove, Sticking Face In Sack Full Of Badgers. This is my favorite instance, though, because it was actually fun trashing one of my all-time favorite movies, and I think this article keeps being timely as even “respectable” news sites seem to now constantly be putting out purposely terrible articles to get traffic by everyone dunking on them.

8. Trump Holds Press Conference To Announce He Got Cool New Calculator Watch

I had a lot of fun with Trump, and a few different articles represented a sort of apolitical approach to him that I think was best where you’re just joking with his personality but not trying to make a political point. Some of my favorites were Anti-Wall Extremist The Kool-Aid Man Leads Campaign Against Trump, Trump Secures Unlimited Chips And Salsa In Mexican Trade Deal, and Trump Proves He's Not A Racist By Showing His Rejection Letter From The KKK. This one was not super popular, but it’s one of my favorites that I actually had to fight a little to get published because it was going to take a photoshop, and no one thought it would do well. But it’s a fun article about Trump trying to keep a press conference focused on his new ability to do math anywhere. Plus, Trump is right: a calculator watch is pretty amazing.

7. Report: The Squirrels Are Up To Something

What I like about this one is how simple and silly it is. And it feels like it’s based on truth, too, as the way squirrels behave, it really does seem like they’re up to something.

6. Man On Right Side Of History Surprised To Find He Still Went To Hell

I’ve always found the people talking about the “right side of history” particularly loathsome. Usually, they’re trying to justify their terrible behavior, thinking it doesn’t matter because they’ll be seen as the heroes in the long run. The history books are seen as salvation for the secular, but in the actual long run, what the history books say about you doesn’t matter.

My favorite thing to write is dialog, and this one ended up being written more like a sketch of a sympathetic devil being frustrated alongside the man who ended up in hell despite history speaking up for him.

5. Meow Mix Sued For False Advertising After Study Shows Cats Were Just Making Standard Cat Noises And Not Asking For A Particular Brand Of Food

Not much to say about this one except it’s just pure dumb and has nothing political to it — often my favorite type of article. “Dumb” is often one of my favorite compliments for an article; it’s the dumb ones that make me laugh the most consistently when revisiting them.

4. Report: Mansplaining Down But Woman Confusion Up

Nice, concise headlines were not my best specialty, but here is a good one with a really funny article to go with it. For some reason, this got sat on for a while which I can’t remember why, as it seemed pretty certain this would be a hit to me. Thinking back on it, the only way it could be better is if I came up with a good condensed word like “mansplaining” for woman confusion.

3. Prodigal Son Kicked Back Out After Old Tweets Surface

A lot of what initially distinguished The Babylon Bee early on was its Christian-specific humor that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. This was never as popular, though, as the political humor, which was what tended to go viral. So it was nice to occasionally have a religious joke that combined with politics, and this is probably the best example of mine that did really well. It does well to illustrate where progressive politics conflict most directly with Christianity: the concept of forgiveness.

2. Least Masculine Society In Human History Decides Masculinity Is A Growing Threat

This is the ultimate example of the article I constantly wanted to rewrite, as we’re constantly getting bombarded with screeds on the problems of “toxic masculinity,” which seems crazy when we are the least masculine society in human history. Our problems — with young men not taking responsibility and the crisis of fatherlessness — are much more lack of masculinity than too much. I also think this is a hilarious article, and I especially like the part about Duke Miller the marine at the end.

1. Dumb AOC Accidentally Strangles Herself Tying Her Shoes (Because She Is So Stupid)

Early on, we got criticism from the left for all our “AOC is so dumb” articles, and for some reason, it popped into my head, “I’ll show them! I’ll write the worst possible AOC is dumb article!” I’m not sure how that would show them, but I couldn’t let go of the idea. And here we are.

And it is dumb. It’s my favorite article because it’s so stupid that it’s still funny to me every time I read it (I especially love the phrase “brain-dumb”). And it confused so many people. Some on the right thought it was just a regular “AOC is stupid" article, while many more on the left didn’t catch that it was satire of ourselves. It worked well for The Babylon Bee because when people on the left wanted to show the site wasn’t funny, they’d use this one and then look like an idiot when everyone pointed out this one was obviously satire of satire.

But none of that was intentional. It was just an idea that sounded so dumb it tickled me.

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So that’s my top ten. There are a few I’m upset didn’t make the list, and maybe on a different day they would, but I’ll stick by this.

So what are your favorite The Babylon Bee articles?