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And you’re in luck, because today, I found an incredible wire story from exactly 100 years ago that turned out to be a joke, sitting directly on top of a story that was completely real, and much stranger than the joke itself.

The piece ran under a Vienna dateline, quoting a nose specialist named Dr. Peoria, warning that heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey will need a more "punch-proof" nose, since his was supposedly built from paraffine. He argues that his will be badly out of shape by the time he finished his upcoming title defense against Gene Tunney. This story ran in multiple papers as a wire-piece.

Obviously interested, I had to dig in. And of course, it quickly didn’t hold up. An invented-sounding name, a wire dateline that read like a punchline, and details that didn’t match anything in the real record. This was simply wire-service satire dressed up as a news item, a common enough format in this era's papers. Especially given the much anticipated upcoming heavyweight title bout.

But it turns out that it was satire built on top of something completely real.