It's satire -- it's from The Borowitz Report section of The New Yorker, by Andy Borowitz [1], who, among other things, created The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (yes, really).
Now, you'd think, even if one isn't aware that The Borowitz Report is meant to be satirical, that the word "humor" in the URL would tip people off, but apparently, this isn't so -- in fact, it's enough of an issue that The Awl has a piece entitled "The Borowitz Problem" [2], which is an interesting read. It starts with this statistic:
According to Thompson, “The Borowitz Report” was responsible for six percent of all of NewYorker.com’s traffic last year.
And then makes this point:
But when you publish a fake headline that sounds almost real, place it on top of satire that's soft enough to skim without really reading, give it a newyorker.com URL, and promote it on Facebook, where basically every headline sounds like satire now, you know what you're really doing.
Not always, but frequently, these posts are going to go viral as the result of people who don't know they're jokes; as a bonus, every few months, a foreign outlet will aggregate them as if they're genuine. That Travolta story had, at one point, over ten thousand Facebook shares, not because a sophisticated joke flew over thousands of heads, but because its form is intentionally misleading.
Now, you'd think, even if one isn't aware that The Borowitz Report is meant to be satirical, that the word "humor" in the URL would tip people off, but apparently, this isn't so -- in fact, it's enough of an issue that The Awl has a piece entitled "The Borowitz Problem" [2], which is an interesting read. It starts with this statistic:
According to Thompson, “The Borowitz Report” was responsible for six percent of all of NewYorker.com’s traffic last year.
And then makes this point:
But when you publish a fake headline that sounds almost real, place it on top of satire that's soft enough to skim without really reading, give it a newyorker.com URL, and promote it on Facebook, where basically every headline sounds like satire now, you know what you're really doing.
Not always, but frequently, these posts are going to go viral as the result of people who don't know they're jokes; as a bonus, every few months, a foreign outlet will aggregate them as if they're genuine. That Travolta story had, at one point, over ten thousand Facebook shares, not because a sophisticated joke flew over thousands of heads, but because its form is intentionally misleading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Borowitz
[2] http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/the-borowitz-problem