If you haven’t heard of The Onion, ask a younger person. Like Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” The Onion is a humorous take on the news. It features satirical headlines and made-up stories. Many times, the fake stories are a sly commentary on real news stories of the day.

Here’s one recent Onion headline: “New poll finds 74 percent of Americans would be comfortable blaming female president for problems.” Another says “Obama lays out plan to achieve lasting peace talks in Middle East.”

But The Onion came under fire recently by The Atlantic, one of the finest (real) journalism sites on the internet.

“The Onion had a problem: It fell behind the times,” The Atlantic wrote.

And if the magazine had stopped there, it would have been perfectly correct. But it didn’t. The writer went on, “The mock newspaper hadn’t printed an issue on actual paper since 2013, and in the period since, it never redesigned its website.”

Here’s the thing. The Onion did fall behind the times, and it’s failing more and more in its job to satirize the news and current cultural trends.

But that’s not because its website is old. It’s because you can’t satirize something this ridiculous.

Satire is an important political and cultural tool. Satire works, largely, by being the truth “writ large” — taken to a ridiculous extreme.

But current events have already gone there themselves.

Take the current panic on college campuses, an all-engulfing fear of disagreeable ideas. When Brown University held a debate over the idea of a rape culture, students set up a “safe space.”

According to the New York Times, this space “was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

How about Hillary Clinton running for president as a Washington outsider, as a populist who understands the middle class and as a wealth redistributionist?

“We have to take on broader inequities in society — you can’t separate unrest in the streets from cycles of poverty and despair in communities,” she tweeted on April 29.

But as Politico points out, “the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president … To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.”

Finally, there’s the left’s dogged presumption that the freedom of speech should be curtailed to preserve the feelings of would-be terrorists. After two Islamists drove to Garland hoping to shoot up an event centering around a Muhammad cartoon-drawing contest, the Washington Post had the shameless headline, “Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas.”

And that’s why The Onion is struggling. It’s not an obsolete website design. It’s simply that the self-parody of current events has outpaced The Onion’s ability to parody them.