There’s nothing that gets American journalists quite so giddy as an authoritarian mouthpiece failing to get a joke—as when, in September 2012, Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency reported on a Gallup poll that found an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans preferred President Ahmadinejad to President Obama. It wasn’t a real Gallup poll, of course: It was an Onion article, as every English-language news site in the world gleefully pointed out. A month later, it was The People’s Daily turn, as the official newspaper of China’s Communist Party reported that a certain American newspaper had named North Korea’s Kim Jong Un the “Sexiest Man Alive.” Again, the internet erupted with laughter.

But like any good tale of hubris, some those same American websites—along with countless, hapless Facebook users—proved equally gullible in the coming months. The Washington Post fell for a report that Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera America, Breitbart believed that Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy, and Drudge Report splashed an article claiming that a New York pizzeria owner, angry over the proposed ban on large sodas, had refused to serve Mayor Michael Bloomberg a second slice. The culprit this time wasn’t The Onion, though. It was The Daily Currant, a site that calls itself “The Global Satirical Newspaper of Record.”

Our domestic media, at least, had an excuse. While it takes a particularly keen immunity to irony to fall for an Onion article these days, The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site’s founder contends his critics don’t have a sense of subtlety—the site’s business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it’s not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that “truth” is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate’s Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, “It’s a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true.”

To choose a recent example: “Obama Pledges $700 Billion Bailout of VA” isn’t a headline whose humor you might miss on the first pass but find sly in retrospect. It’s just an unfunny lie, and any American who doesn’t keep a close eye on the size of federal budgets—the VA’s was $139 billion last year—could be forgiven for believing it. Not every fake-news site needs to signal its intentions as quickly and openly as The Onion does, but The Daily Currant’s headlines don’t engage in subtlety so much as fail entirely to signal humorous intention. That would be acceptable, perhaps even clever, if the stories themselves skillfully exploited the reader’s initial credulity, the copy growing increasingly ludicrous until the reader realizes the joke. Instead, jokes sometimes materialize in the final lines, but they’re half-baked at best. The VA story ends with Obama dismissing calls for officials to resign. “Why,” Obama asks, “would holding people accountable for their actions be necessary?” That neither funny nor satirical. But it rings true to partisans who genuinely believe that Obama thinks that way—the same people who, in a flash of outrage, are most likely to share the story on social media.

The Currant’s string of successes in duping media outlets last year drove a brief flurry of head-scratching and hand-wringing. Gawker’s Max Read called the site “semi-believable political wish-fulfillment articles distinguished by a commitment to a complete absence of what most people would recognize as ‘jokes.’” Politico’s Dylan Byers put it bluntly in his headline, “The Daily Currant Isn’t Funny,” writing, “If their stories are plausible, it’s because they aren’t funny enough. No one—almost no one—mistakes The Onion for a real news organization. That’s not just because it has greater brand recognition. It’s because their stories make readers laugh.” And in The New Republic, Luke O’Neil argued that such stories “could do actual damage to political discourse and the media in general... Juicing an already true-enough premise with more unbelievability simply adds to the informational noise pollution—without even the expected payoff of a laugh.”