The Four Levels of Fame, from Least to Greatest:

1. You get a Wikipedia entry.

2. They mention you in The Onion.

3. You do a spot on "Fresh Air with Terri Gross".

4. You get a guest shot on The Simpsons.

1. You get a Wikipedia entry.

How does one merit enough fame to be granted a Wiki entry?

Cripers, that was lame.

Isn't the Onion supposed to at least try to be funny...?
I mean the target audience for that article is pretty small and I should be right in the middle of it but I've read shampoo bottles that are funnier than that.

I read an article about record store clerks dying in a fire at a yo La Tengo concert, in Onion. I damn near cried, I was laughing so hard.

This article was not funny... but I did get a chuckle out of one the banner ads on the page linking to a story about how CGI can make a realistic Oscar award for Michael Bay.

humor = subjective

see: Spalding Gray

I think with the Onion the real grabber is the headline. The actual article is usually a series of smaller news cliches/punchlines. Sometimes they're basically just an afterthought. The problem with this one is the headline isn't very clear in what it's talking about and isn't in itself funny. The article can't pick up the slack for a not-very-strong conceit.

The Onion has had a tremendous run of great baseball headlines, though, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.

How does one merit enough fame to be granted a Wiki entry?

All I know is that creating & running b-ref isn't deemed important enough, as wikipedia shut down it's Sean Forman page.

Yeah, this wasn't very good, but the line about Lupica and the part about Kay were pretty funny.

I think with the Onion the real grabber is the headline. The actual article is usually a series of smaller news cliches/punchlines.

I don't know if it's still available as a podcast right now, it's available to stream from their website, but This American Life had a show themed "tough room" a week or two ago (may have been a repeat). The first story runs 15 minutes or so, and it's all about the inner workings of the Onion and the process of coming up with the headlines and stories. The vast majority of what they come up with are rejected, but it was freaking hilarious. It starts about 4:30 in. Here's the description:

Act One. Make 'em Laff.

Host Ira Glass spends time in perhaps the toughest room on earth, the editorial meeting at the satirical newspaper, The Onion, where there's one laugh for every 100 jokes. (14 minutes)

I mean the target audience for that article is pretty small and I should be right in the middle of it but I've read shampoo bottles that are funnier than that.

Their sports articles tend to be for very narrow audiences.

If I go by that list of "fame", then Alan Moore, Sam Neill, William Daniels, Tom Arnold, Fantasia Barrino, Nick Bakay and Jane Kaczmarek are all more famous then Harrison Ford, David Letterman, Will Smith, Michael Jordan and Peyton Manning.

Even allowing the fact that Alan Moore is (enters comic book geek mode) the greatest Comic Book writer of all time (exits comic book geek mode, reenters Baseball geek mode), I find the list flawed.

Cripers, that was lame.

Yeah, the story wasn't as good as the headline. I linked it primarily because of the Gleeman reference.

Probably the Onion's best baseball headline was "Bill James cracks up SABR Convention with a particularly witty stat".

From the non-sports category, the Skull ####### Bill of 2007 had me peeing in my pants the first twelve times I watched it.