The problem with your explanation is that Intel is troubled enough to be purchased, and the US currently has no issue allowing monopolies. In a world in which Paramount is buying Warners, and Sysco is buying Restaurant Depot, AMD buying struggling Intel is not an obvious joke. Or at least it isn’t without some additional tag. “AMD set to buy beleaguered Intel in an all-DDR5 deal.”

Look at any of the websites trying to be the Onion. They seldom get the thing that makes Onion headlines just right.

Your Patriots joke works (and would be a pretty good April Fools joke) because it’d come out of nowhere. If you make the same joke but about the Washington Commanders changing their name to the Corporals (a joke structured the same way as yours), it wouldn’t be as obviously a joke because that team has a history of name changes and Trump telling them to change their name isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Your Patriots joke also works because the joke isn’t that they’re changing their name, it’s that they are changing their name to the opposite. “New England Patriots changing their name” isn’t funny. “AMD buying Intel” contains the same amount of information; that is to say nothing funny.

I said before that a joke has to have context to make sense. That’s not quite right. It has to have context and we all have to kinda agree what that context is. You assuming that an AMD/Intel monopoly is impossible is what makes the headline a joke for you, but if I disagree about the context (that said monopoly is possible) than it doesn’t work. Judging from the other replies, I don’t think I’m the only one for whom it doesn’t work.