No one could have guessed The Onion would amount to much. How could it have? As I reflect in my book The Onion Story: How a Band of Misfits, Dropouts, and Sad Sacks Built the World’s Most Trusted News Source, a look back at my many decades at the helm of the publication, The Onion wasn’t founded by the kinds of Harvard M.B.A.’s, S.N.L. veterans, or media titans who traditionally create magazines, found newspapers, or even consider humor writing a legitimate career path. It was founded by a bunch of twentysomething slackers who were, by traditional metrics, unemployable anywhere else.
In fact, most of us couldn’t even hold down dishwashing, clerking, or other food-service-industry jobs. I was fired from A&W because I never mastered that special A&W way of microwaving hot dogs.
It made sense that The Onion didn’t come out of a literary center such as New York. It came out of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a top party school.
One prominent Onion staff writer initially sent me an e-mail submission with the subject line “Area Loser Wants Job.” The stuff wasn’t bad, so I called him. He told me he was pushing 30, lived in his mother’s basement, and felt too insecure to leave the house much in the last 10 years. I thought to myself, “Just the kind of talent we’re looking for!”
The Power of Being Unfit
Business experts talk about building teams by hiring “the best and the brightest”—the “A players.” It sounds like a great strategy, but it wouldn’t have worked for The Onion.
I discovered another early writer after I witnessed her street art in and around Madison. She had put up parody flyers all over town mocking a missing student presumed abducted. She had dug a hole in the grassy median in front of her apartment with a sign over it that said: Who took our baby!? I hired her immediately.
With writers like these, we got into some trouble with our early material. Lawsuit threats came at us from local fast-food chains, the governor of Wisconsin, and a local butcher shop. Years later, from two U.S. presidents. (George W. Bush sent a cease-and-desist letter in 2005, and Donald Trump has made several threats over the years.) This trouble, oddly, led to increased circulation, expansion, and more ad sales.
A Rule for Rulebreakers
Our rule in the writers’ room was that your ideas are probably terrible, so let them succeed on their own merits. And never pitch them. Pitching ideas artificially elevates them, giving them razzle-dazzle they don’t deserve. Let them live or die under the harsh scrutiny of a bunch of jaded comedy know-it-alls. This unforgiving process resulted in crying fits, walkouts, and the occasional panic attack. Some firings too.
The vast majority of our ideas were, in fact, terrible. By eliminating all except a tiny handful that “didn’t suck too bad,” The Onion’s voice—its distinctive, strangely earnest, journalistic deadpan—was born. It was the collective voice of a room full of bored no-accounts who mocked everything, including comedy itself.
Once in a while, we’d come up with something good:
“Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day”
“Everyone Involved In Pizza’s Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High”
“Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back”
“Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian”
Plugging Away
The Onion just had its 37th birthday. I haven’t been affiliated for almost a decade now. I marvel at the resilience of its scrappy voice, which is so often imitated but never matched.
The loose collection of Wisconsin ne’er-do-wells who built the The Onion ended up winning big after all. Staff writer Rich Dahm became the executive producer at The Colbert Report, as did Ben Karlin at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Dan Vebber at The Simpsons. There are so many others—a ragtag bunch of losers who made good. But if you called them that, they’d be the first to roll their eyes, because that’s a comedy cliché as old as The Bad News Bears.
Scott Dikkers is the former co-owner of The Onion and the publication’s longest-serving editor
