These quintessential outsiders are creating a media empire, including books, radio, internet, and movie deals. But will success spoil America’s sharpest humor magazine.
Milking the Onion
“Report: Gen X Irony, Cynicism May Be Permanently Obsolete” — The Onion, September 26, 2001
Some might see this headline as the sad self-eulogy of the Onion, the online and print newspaper that spoofs culture and politics and reads like USA Today as edited by Alfred E. Neuman.
From its inception, the Onion has parodied media coverage and what we deem newsworthy, exposing larger issues about American society through humor. A typical week’s worth of headlines may include “Nation’s Porn Stars Demand to Be Fucked Harder,” “Bush Trying to Decide How to Spend His Tax Refund,” and “Surgeon General: Americans Have Gigantic Fat Asses.”
I visited them last year at their new New York headquarters and sat in on an editorial meeting. Dressed in the slacker uniform of retro theme T-shirts and baggy shorts, they batted around ideas over assorted takeout containers. Between soda runs they hashed out possible articles on Janet Reno, Chechnya, and the more pressing matter of the growing popularity of salsa as a condiment.
Did I mention one of the writers was buck-naked?
“In honor of Penthouse,” Joe Garden said of his pasty bare chest and flaccid penis, a Rosie O’Donnell doll smiling like a deranged kewpie on the bookshelf behind his head.
That was before September 11.
When I stop by Onion HO soon after the terrorist attacks, staffers are still figuring out that fine line between humor and offensiveness. As evidenced by David Letterman’s and Jon Stewart’s shell-shocked first shows back on air, being funny has suddenly become hard. Especially when a good portion of your jokes derive from America’s political leaders and their foibles.
It’s fall in New York, so the staff’s shorts and T-shirts have been replaced by torn jeans and flannel button-downs. Reno has been replaced by Rumsfeld, Chechnya by Afghanistan, and the popularity of salsa has been replaced by whether or not Lara Flynn Boyle bleaches her anus.
Oh, and Joe’s still naked.
“September 11 didn’t really change the Onion except to the extent that it changed the world, and the Onion reflects the world,” says Tim Harrod, a staff writer.
This is good news for the Onion’s large fan base, which turns to the paper for its unblinking critique of culture and Swiftian approach to satire. Over the past ten years the Onion has quietly become the Next Big Thing in comedy. Its success is the tale of the Little Independent That Could. In a media world where a handful of corporations owns all the major news and entertainment outlets, these satirists have managed to expand without being bought out or cushioning their sensibility to appeal to the masses. Their empire has grown to include books, radio shows, and possible movie deals. Their fans range from late-night host Conan O’Brien to Simpsons creator Matt Groening to former Vice President Al Gore — who has found himself the brunt of many an Onion headline, including “Gore Upset That Clinton Doesn’t Call Anymore.”
Their humor drifts from lowest-common-denominator shtick to acute political commentary, with the same biting tone no matter how high- or lowbrow the subject. “If I had to choose three words to describe us, I’d say smart, mean, and honest,” says editor-in-chief Rob Siegel, who is loath to be lumped in with the empty shock antics of MTV’s Jackass or a Farrelly brothers flick.
“We don’t want to be offensive for offensiveness’s sake,” says Siegel. “We really take pains to make sure whatever we say we’re on the right side of the issue. There’s no subject we would never joke about.”
Take their September 11 coverage. A more timid humor publication would have kept a low profile until things blew over, and then skipped the issue altogether. Instead: “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie,” “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule,” “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.”
On the Onion’s first day back online, its site received a record 399,791 visitors — about 100,000 more than the previous peak the week after the 2000 presidential elections. Within hours of their post-attack coverage going up, readers posted their reactions on Plastic.com, an Internet news-commentary site. “God bless the Onion,” wrote one fan.
“I was actually nauseous the whole week,” says Joe Garden, who donned clothes after his butt started sticking to his ergonomic chair. “Not that we were doing the wrong thing, but because I thought we’d come off as doing the wrong thing.”
‘“In honor of Penthouse,” Joe Garden said of his pasty bare chest and flaccid penis’
Garden has a habit of taking off his pants in front of fellow journalists. Last year the Onion moved from Madison, Wisconsin, home of the cheese-head and polka, to media-central New York City, home of the cell phone and power lunch, to help facilitate its leap to the major leagues. The New Yorker, Gotham’s bastion of intellectual high-mindedness and good taste, which had previously adjudged the Onion “the funniest publication in the United States,” invited the staff out for a friendly softball match as a welcome to the city. Garden dropped trou during the game while, from the bleachers, head writer Todd Hanson mercilessly razzed some of New York’s finest journalists.
“They beat the crap out of us,” says Garden, by now used to crushing defeat (back in Wisconsin, the Onion gang lost 17 of their 21 games with two wins by forfeit). “I actually got a dig in at one of the cartoonists. I was manning third base, and he said, ‘I’ve been doing cartoons since the seventies,’ and I said, ‘What’s your specialty: doctors or lawyers?’”
Garden’s nudism stunt typifies the humor that has earned the Onion its reputation as one of the sharpest satirical publications today. Refusing to align themselves with any institution or group, they remain quintessential outsiders. Their style is pointed and political, no matter how revered or off-limits the subject, whether it be Columbine (“Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying”) or Christopher Reeve (“Christopher Reeve Placed Atop Washington Monument”). And whenever big-deal publications like the New Yorker extend a hand to welcome the Onion to their prestigious ranks, the Onion not only says “No thank you,” but undoes its belt buckle and moons them.
The paper was brought into the world in 1988 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison by students Tim Keck and Chris Johnson. It was a black-and-white give-away with coupons for Mike’s Super Subs on the back. “The U. Wisconsin campus is inundated with the most serious, lead-footed, politically minded student journalism you’ve ever seen,” says staff writer John Krewson. “It’s a very political campus. It’s huge — 50,000 students — so there were seven or eight weekly papers. We were the fun one.”
The setting was ripe for the Onion to take root and develop its formula. It’s unlikely the publication could have been born in the savage media-saturated New York market. “Out in Wisconsin, far from the entertainment industry, it had time to find its voice without any interference,” says Siegel. “It was a good ten years before anybody really paid it any attention. If we were in New York, people would have been more impatient with it.”
Keck and Johnson turned over the Onion after about a year to Peter Haise, now the company’s CEO, and Scott Dikkers, who has since left the paper. Originally, the sheet was a combination of tabloidy Weekly World News headlines and sophomoric college humor. After a few years it found its formula and started to resemble its current incarnation. In 1994 Haise and Dikkers launched a regional edition in Milwaukee, and later expanded to Denver and Chicago.
While they’ve always had a strong base in the college bong-hit set, things really took off when the Onion went online in 1996. Its antiestablishment parodies, like “14-Year-Old Collapses Under Weight of Corporate Logos,” were forwarded into office inboxes across the nation, traveling from cubicle to cubicle like the whispers of a worker-bee revolution.
“We were in the right place at the right time,” says Garden. “We had actually established ourselves in a smaller environment as a comedy source. We knew what we were doing, we had a focus, so when we went online it was just a matter of putting the printed page up — we had already worked out the kinks. The Internet is the biggest reason we caught on.”
These days, while other comedy sites have folded into the dotcom graveyard, the Onion gets up to a million hits a week. Starbucks firewalled the Website from its corporate server, citing it as being too anti-productive for the coffee chain’s employees. (The move came on the heels of the Onion article “Starbucks to Begin Sinister ‘Phase Two’ of Operation.”) Besides a handful of Webby awards (the Internet’s answer to the Oscars) and the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Onion was mentioned on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the gauge of cultural relevance in our society.
Onion Radio News, the broadcast version of the paper, is syndicated to more than 100 stations. DreamWorks optioned two of its articles, “10th Circle Added to Rapidly Growing Hell” and “Canadian Girlfriend Unsubstantiated.” Earlier this year the Onion inked a deal with Miramax for first-look rights to story ideas. “They’re basically paying for first rights to our brains,” says editor Siegel. “In return, we have a nice inside track to getting a movie made.”
On the publishing front, they’ve released three books: Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines From Americas Finest News Source (which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 24 weeks), The Onion’s Finest News Reporting, and Dispatches From the Tenth Circle: The Best of the Onion.
The next logical step is television, a possibility they have not discounted, but which they are hesitant to confirm. “I’m sure it would be a small cultish Larry Sanders-type thing,” says Siegel. “The audience would change if we ran it on NBC. The bigger the audience the more broad you have to be with your humor.”
‘“Maybe I just need to grow up, and this is something I shouldn’t have at age 29, but I like it,” says editor-in-chief Rob Siegel.’
Creative freedom, the Onion maintains, is the biggest consideration when it comes to such deals. While there’s no doubt all concerned would welcome the larger paychecks that would come with a corporate relationship, they would be nervous about being forced to tone down the Onion aesthetic. “There’s something about people who acquire things,” says John Krewson, the staff’s sole Married Guy, “whether it be a big company or a girlfriend; they then want to change you into something they did not like in the first place.”
Given their anti-establishment slant, perhaps the most ironic measure of their arrival to the big time was Siegel’s nomination by People magazine to its Top 100 list of eligible bachelors for 2001. “He was living in my computer room at the time,” says Krewson.
Keeping its ego in check may be the Onion’s best safeguard against slipping into elitist “doctors or lawyers” — type humor. Onion staffers have never had compunctions about turning their cultural criticism on themselves. They may make fun of small-town slackers who watch too much cable and eat too much pizza, but they’re the first to admit that’s exactly who they themselves are. Each writer specializes in a subject that he or she embodies — even though by the time it gets through a merciless editing process all traces of individuality are effectively subsumed into one single Onion-flavored voice.
Tim Harrod, who could have been a Trekkie if things had turned out differently in life, comes up with most of the stories about geek culture. Todd Hanson, who wears his dour cynicism as easily as he does his beat-up American-flag Converse sneakers, excels at covering the horrors of modern existence. Senior editor Carol Kolb, who used to run the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue back in Wisconsin, is responsible for most of their shticks about small-town America. Krewson — who’s attended a lot of Packers games — addresses “manly man” issues. Maria Schneider does their turn-of-the-century references (“It comes up more often than you would think,” says Siegel). Chris Karwowski does their food-related items. And then there’s Joe Garden, the naked guy.
As the graphics director, Mike Loew (who wrote the book Tough Call: Hard-Hitting Phone Pranks) probably has the hardest job of the bunch. He procures the photos that illustrate articles like “Area Lesbians Engage in Hot Lesbian Action.” That story was a spoof on the old porn cliche, and entailed convincing the two butchest women he could find to pose for a picture. “There’s just no dignity,” Loew says, shaking his head and resting his hand on the foosball table that decorates the office — a gift from Crown Books, publishers of Our Dumb Century.
Loew has some help from photographer Chad Nackers, who, with his swinging ponytail and goatee, is their Jesus-photo stand-in (which also comes up more often than you’d think).
As staffers are quick to point out, none came from a comedy background. Todd Hanson was a dishwasher before the Onion started paying. Tim Harrod sold sandwiches up the street. Most Onion grads, however, have found themselves plum positions in comedy writing. One is at Fox’s Futurama, another’s the head writer at The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
But mostly the writer turnaround is roughly that of the Rolling Stones: not until someone dies. Most Onion staffers have been there close to a decade, and were happy enough with their jobs to uproot their lives and move to New York. The camaraderie of the group is apparent to anyone who encounters it en masse. They rib each other in front of strangers, get into loud fights, belch, and prop their feet on the table during meetings. Clearly, this publication is more than a job for them.
“It’s like you’re high school friends and you know each other’s secrets, and you know who’s done what incredibly humiliating thing,” says Siegel. “And then after college you all go off and change and get boring jobs and get married and don’t really hang out with your buddies. I feel really lucky I still have that. Maybe I just need to grow up, and this is something I shouldn’t have at age 29, but I like it.”
They log far more time together than the 30 to 50 hours a week in the office. Todd Hanson and Carol Kolb have been dating for five years. Garden and Harrod share an apartment. Most take the same subway home together, separated by mere blocks in the same Brooklyn neighborhood.
“We’re like a band,” says Siegel. “We didn’t come together in the cover letter-and-resume fashion. To this day we don’t really know what to do with resumes. It’s like they’re applying to be our friend.”
They’re the first to admit their cliqueish ness, but part of their unwillingness to open their ranks to outsiders is self-preservation. “Every idea has to go through the central brain trust,” says Siegel. Keeping the staff tight ensures that the Onion doesn’t lose its voice.
Though the Next Big Thing always runs the risk of becoming the Last Big Thing, Onion staffers aren’t worried. Compared to South Park, which found itself on Comedy Central and on the covers of Rolling Stone and Spin in a matter of months, and was then largely forgotten after a couple of seasons, the Onion has been at this considerably longer. Last year it launched a New York edition and put out issue No. 500, with no indication that the fresh ideas will run out anytime soon. The stories about them may have gotten longer and higher-profile, but the buildup has been too gradual to reach saturation point.
“We’ve been doing this for 11 years,” says Maria Schneider.
“We have a really solid fan base who will tell us if we’re screwing up,” says Krewson.
Despite all the accolades and attention, it’s unlikely the Onion will lose the outsider identity that so defines the paper. The staffers couldn’t lose that cred even if they wanted to. For one thing, though they’ve all lived in New York for more than a year, none has adopted the New York look — no black-on-bIack outfits, no Paul Smith sun-glasses, not a kick-boxing-sculpted bicep among them. They more resemble college students in town for a field trip than cocktail-party slicksters.
Even with a circulation of 205,000 and up to a million visitors a week to its Website, the staff has managed to keep a collegiate vibe. Entering one of its meetings is like stumbling into a slacker dorm party. At one point Hanson lies on the ground, his feet propped on a chair, and fakes snoring, much to the annoyance of Maria Schneider, who at the time is reading aloud her story ideas.
Their offices in the hip Chelsea district are a college freshman’s wet dream: In the main area is a ping-pong table, a drum kit, and that foosball table. Action figures and tchotchkes decorate the bookshelves. Their conference table is cluttered with jumbo-size Pixie Stix, half-empty bottles of soda, and a layer of dust. Old editions of the Onion and colorful Lego sets pop out the tops of U-Haul boxes.
The only New York concession the staff seems to have made is that a couple of employees now carry Palm Pilots and Rob Siegel sports trendy Diesel jeans.
If mooning the New Yorker ensures they’ll always be outsiders to the utmost echelon of the media elite, it also ensures they’ll never be expelled from the inner circle, or forgotten like so many other comedy whims. The Onion just does what it does, regardless of whatever media blitzkrieg it finds itself in the middle of, its brain-trusters leaning back in their La-Z-Boys, bag of Doritos in lap, ready to flip the script.
Good news to Advocates of the Allium, as it has survived and thrived in the past 20 years, and you can still visit them online. Who would not be captivated reading front page stories (17 March 2022) like, “Body Language Expert Can Tell With 90% Accuracy If Person Sitting” or “Worst Things You Can Say To A Bartender On St. Patrick’s Day?” … In case you had any doubts, should you be looking for reverence, you will be disappointed here. The rest of us laugh a lot, and that can be a challenge given, y’know, the world.
