---

We couldn’t resist passing this along: The Onion, America’s premier fake newspaper, reports that Prague’s Franz Kafka International Airport ranks last in customer satisfaction “due to long flight delays, poor service, and an overall oppressive, impersonal atmosphere.”

To get some of the jokes in this one, you have to be a bit familiar with the German-speaking Jewish writer born in Prague in 1883 and best known for his narratives of stifling, surreal bureaucracy. His most famous works often place seemingly average protagonists in nightmarish situations they are powerless to change. (Travelers, this may sound familiar…) In his 1925 novel “The Trial,” the character Josef K. is arrested for a crime his accusers refuse to specify. In his famous story “Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find he has inexplicably been turned into a giant bug — possibly a dung beetle.

At any rate, the overarching joke is obviously that air travel can have a decidedly Kafkaesque feel for powerless fliers being processed and re-processed, subjected to seemingly arbitrary rules and sometimes stranded with very little explanation. “I asked the ticket person what gate my flight was at and they said that and they said that the airline I was flying didn’t exist,” one faux-traveler says in the video. “Everyone keeps calling me ‘S.’” Anyway, have a look.

---