AHP Note: Every so often I get a great pitch for a guest interview and hand the Culture Study reins over to someone else (usually a reader who *gets it*) to handle the interview (and get paid for it, of course — your subscriptions made it possible for me to pay significantly above the going industry rate).
This week, Christine Driscoll interviews Christine Wenc about her new history of The Onion — how it started, how it developed its sensibility, and the sort of work environment (and ownership structure) allowed it to thrive. If you have a spectacularly good idea for a future interview, you know where to find me (aka, my email: annehelenpetersen at gmail dot com)
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I first met Christine Wenc when I picked her up for an hour-long car ride to a mutual friend’s home. From the time she got in the car to our arrival, we did not stop talking. We’re both named Christine, Big 10 alumni, moved to Madison, WI from the East Coast (though she’s actually from Wisconsin); and seriously into history and oral histories. I do a version of this work as a podcast producer, but Wenc was writing a book. A history… of The Onion.
It was like meeting a celebrity I didn’t know existed. She wasn’t only writing the book, she was part of the social group that started the paper in Madison, WI in the late 80s. Its founder was her roommate, she did some of the early copy editing and sometimes drew cartoons, but then she moved on. Wenc went to Seattle where she was the editor of the alt weekly The Stranger.
The Onion was the first website I regularly read. Its existence helped form my own political sensibility. I migrated as a reader from The Onion to The AV Club to Dan Savage’s explicit, sex-positive, and funny advice column. Reading Savage Love at age 12 was not only titillating but inoculated me from much of the early 2000s conservatism I could have otherwise absorbed.
I suspect that for others who grew up with it, The Onion was a signal that there were other people who were skeptical of the establishment. And because it was funny it could travel far. For instance, as a teen girl I had to sit through lectures about how magazine images of the perfect body weren’t real. Okay sure, I guess, but it looks pretty real. The Onion made the power of Photoshop explicit with illustrations like Christ Returns to NBA or later, Diamond Joe.
Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire is not just a history of The Onion but the last thirty-five years of the news industry it evolved to mock. We get to meet the writers and designers who pulled all-nighters and rushed to constantly tweak and master new mediums to make the satire seamless. By profiling the individuals who made it, Wenc’s book becomes a study of how attitudes towards work have shifted, too.
Before “Gen X” was a label, it was simply young people living at a particular moment in time reacting to the world around them. Early Onion writers watched their radical college peers go work at investment banks. Those bankers are also Gen X. But the Gen X writers and designers who created The Onion had little reverence for careerism or making tons of money as an ambition. Yet they found enormous success.
And so by necessity, Wenc’s history of satire examines the conflict between making money and making art.
An early source of tension is between Pete Haise, a founding owner who ran the ad department and the staff writers. Most of the writers were simply funny people with part time jobs in Madison. One person was hired from the liquor store because he wrote funny signs.
The writers were cool; Pete Haise was not. And worse, Haise cared about money. He was industrious and packed every issue with ads - their primary source of income. Then as The Onion starts to get some national acclaim, Haise creates another job for himself: owner of two sub shops an hour away in Milwaukee. The writers are equally amused and angered. Does he even care about this? Is his priority selling sandwiches?
Haise loves The Onion but eventually sells his shares of it, and the paper goes through successive owners.
The new owners’ demands for the paper didn’t necessarily affect how readers encountered the paper, but they dramatically shaped the lives of the people working there. And so Funny Because It’s True becomes a tale of modern creative work, or any passion job. It’s funny as hell and full of anecdotes about projects that didn’t work or failed spectacularly. The writers came up with some of the most incisive political commentary despite poor management and ownership indifferent to what made The Onion special. It makes you want to start an art project with your friends.
One of Haise’s critics told Wenc: “Looking back, The Onion’s best ownership, The Onion’s best business mind, was a Milwaukee sub-shop owner, because he paid the staff salaries and left us alone.”
I wanted to talk to Wenc more about the nature of writing an oral history and the social and economic conditions that made The Onion possible and if we can find those conditions today.
CD: How did you get interested in writing a history of The Onion? I know it started as an oral history and then moved into a more reported work. We’re both big history nerds, so can you talk about that decision and how your reporting has changed some of the history?
CW: When I moved from Boston back to Madison in 2017 — a place I hadn’t lived in 25 years — I naturally started thinking about my college days at UW-Madison, which included being on the original staff of The Onion. (The Onion was founded by my friend Tim Keck when we were 19-20 years old. I met Tim in the dorms our freshman year. He asked me to be the art director but I didn’t know what that was. I became the copy editor instead. I also drew illustrations and did some writing.)
I went on to do other things a couple of years after The Onion was founded, I had nothing to do with making The Onion famous in the mid-90s. So in many ways, when I started this project, I still thought of The Onion as this funny thing my friends made in college. I had no idea of how highly regarded it was in the comedy community nor how influential it was. I did not know there had been Onion print editions in about a dozen different cities, I didn’t know anything about the Onion News Network, I hadn’t read any of their books after Our Dumb Century. I found out about all that stuff over the years I spent researching the book and interviewing people. It was a much more interesting story than I had expected.
Another reason I wanted to write it was because 2017 was the beginning of the first Trump administration, and everyone was talking about “fake news” all the time. On one especially ridiculous news day, I thought, “Man, I wonder what the old Onion folks think of this.”
Finally, the last reason I wanted to write this book was that when I started googling “onion history” I discovered, to my surprise, that there was a lot of inaccurate information online. Even the Wikipedia page was wrong. But when I tried to edit it, it got changed back — and the reason was because there weren’t any published sources to support the edits! The situation kind of made my head spin. I hope it now gets corrected. As a historian I’m well aware that documentation and sources really matter, and that if the information in your sources is wrong, your idea of history is going to be wrong too.
I also just had sort of patriotic feelings for The Onion and it made me mad that the people who made it — especially the 1990s staff who created The Onion’s voice — were not getting proper credit. (I don’t mean me, since my role there was limited and a long time ago and I had nothing to do with making it famous.)
CD: The Onion came out of Madison, WI in the late 80s. What is it about Madison, WI or the Midwest that made it the place The Onion was born? There is a distinctly Midwestern "nowhere" humor in it that's hard to identify, but it didn’t come out of D.C. or Austin, or even Chicago. Though eventually it moves between New York and Chicago. How important is place to The Onion?
CW: The Midwestern sensibility has been really important to The Onion for many reasons, especially when it was still in Madison and written mostly by Wisconsinites in the 1990s and early 2000s. One is that even though The Onion often has really excellent writing, the place has not been about individual star writers or egos. There are no bylines and a lot of the work is done collectively. In the Midwest, it’s really frowned upon to be visibly ambitious or aggressive in your desire to get ahead. I lived in NYC long enough to know that this is definitely not the case elsewhere.
But creativity is a basic human activity — so people still do it. And having space and time outside of the entertainment industry takes off a ton of pressure while you are developing your creative voice. As one person in the book says, in Madison you can do whatever you want in your performance or your band or whatever: be free and experiment. It’s not like some big agent is going to come to your show. As a result, the focus really goes to the work — the process and the fun and exploration.
Intellectually, it’s similar. I knew brilliant people in Madison, who knew so much and had such vast stores of knowledge about all kinds of stuff, and who could talk about it intelligently and creatively. I later then studied and worked in some pretty fancy parts of academia and discovered that people I knew in Madison were just as smart–and sometimes more–than these fancy Ivy League types. They just weren’t in a place where people performed and professionalized their knowledge the way you’re expected to do in the Ivy League. They just talked about stuff because they liked it.
Of course, location can also stymie you, but in some ways that’s an illusion too. Being in the vicinity of all that money and power doesn’t mean any of it is going to come to you. I think that a lot of young artists/writers/musicians move to a place like NYC and discover that unfortunately it’s so expensive and cramped to live there that they have to spend all their time making money and riding on the subway, and so they lose all the time they used to have back in their cheap hometowns to make their art and hang out with their weirdo artsy friends. (That’s basically what happened to me.)
The Onion’s original Midwestern-small-business model kept all its money in-house. The money went to pay writer salaries and keep the office lights on. Stuff that existed in a material reality. As if The Onion was a local auto body shop or something. Of course they wanted to make money, but it was just a different idea and a different scale than when it became an investment and thereby much more wrapped up in imaginary things. And people who were not actually working there, or were not there day-to-day, 9-5, became the ones who got most of the money.
And I think the book shows that The Onion cannot be looked at or used as an investment. It’s a public service, like journalism is ideally supposed to be.
CD: Let's get simple: why is it important to satirize the news? We've all felt a deep tug of recognition at some Onion headline and I bet most people reading right now could recite one. But why was news such a perfect target? And as the power of news as an industry is on the wane, and our political reality feels beyond parody, does news satire still work?
CW: News is a good target because it is such a good straight man. And because it’s supposed to be simply describing reality “objectively,” though of course people like Noam Chomsky have shown that news is actually often just shaping and describing reality the way that the powerful would like it shaped and described.
Yet sometimes the reality news shows perform isn’t so much an expression of the powers that be but rather this bizarre middlebrow, status quo thing that can feel ludicrous and surreal. The tension between what news says is reality and what reality actually is for many people shapes some of the best Onion humor.
The format and structure of the news was built for a time when politicians and the public generally followed certain norms. Now, though, they don’t —even while the format continues to pretend that they do. That’s why the news now often seems like a real-life Onion story. Real life actually is doing what The Onion does. We are all participants in this bizarre performance art project now.
Whether news satire works in this situation anymore is a good question. I don’t know. I quote one former Onion head writer in the book who says that today’s total fragmentation of the media environment and the firehose of fake news means that there is no longer any straight line to go with your punch line. So to him, news satire is maybe pointless now. But a different former Onion writer disagreed: he told me that if you can’t satirize the current news, then you aren’t trying hard enough.
Satirizing the news is important because it points out the flaws in the way we frame and characterize “facts” — a frame that is built so deeply into our culture that we can barely even see it. Satire makes that framing funny and exposes how weird it is, which then maybe allows an opening to think of a new way to frame and talk about real things. Which we really, really need right now.
CD: There’s so much drama as The Onion is sold several times and groups of people try to wring money out of it. It moves to New York, there are new demands on profitability, and then it’s sold to an investment group who just wants to make money. Mostly through advertising. At one point the bigwigs want to photoshop brands into old illustrations as a way of getting brand money. It doesn’t happen. So The Onion persists but it also just doesn’t make money the way these owners want. Are satire and humor inherently incompatible with profit? There’s also an interesting generational and class difference in how writers responded to it.
As former head writer Todd Hanson says in the book, “satire is about speaking truth to power. Marketing and advertising are about telling lies on behalf of power.”
Has there ever been a wealthy satirist? I don’t know. You do have to have an outsider’s perspective to do good satire, and it’s very difficult to get a lot of money and continue to be an outsider. Even if you think you’re some kind of “rebel,” really the only rebellious thing you could do would be to give most of that money away to people who need it way more than you do. Or do things like buy a few million acres of cornfields in Iowa and spend the rest of your life restoring them back to prairie. Now that would be radical (and have profoundly beneficial effects long into the future).
The Onion’s creativity was best served back when it was a small local business and not an investment in somebody’s portfolio, as it started to become when it first was purchased by a wealthy investor and the editorial office moved to New York in 2001-2003. The old model just wasn’t going to work anymore because of how expensive it is to live and rent office space and the competitiveness of the media market. Then about 10 years later it was sold to a big media company and then to a private-equity type group where they don’t care really what the companies they own do, just whether they can make money again when they sell them. (AHP note: The Onion is now owned by Global Tetrahedron, with former NBC News journalist Ben Collins as CEO — and has been doing some pretty interesting stuff, like this recent ad buy in the New York Times).
Still, satirists need to eat and have a place to live and access to health care and a good therapist. If we had a society that made it easy to have enough, to give everyone a decent ordinary life — instead of the one we have now — you would see so much art and creativity that is currently being crushed by people’s financial circumstances. That would include satire.
It’s possible that some of the later generations of Onion writers — the ambitious ones that came from more connected, savvy, and privileged backgrounds — did not have quite the same edge and rage as the earlier generation. They were still very funny, but they were just coming from a different life experience. (But of course everybody thinks that their generation is the most interesting one, so.) And the later generations also were just working in a different environment–their content production expectations were a lot higher and they were now expected to respond to current news. The Gen X staff in Madison did not. That alone would change how The Onion read and felt regardless of the background of the people writing it.
CD: One of the most fun segments of this book, and there are a lot, was The Onion News Network (ONN) portion. Why did ONN matter?
CW: I’m not a TV scholar but I think ONN exposes the structure of the typical video news story — and how so much of what is on cable news is just BS–filler between advertisements, filler to fill up time, to just have something on the screen 24/7 and keep butts in seats, rather than serve the community by providing essential, important, and interesting information. In the book I talk about the ONN video “Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere” which is a master class on how cable news creates its nonstories.
I recently did a live local TV interview for this book, which I had never done before, with the robo-cams changing their focus from the anchor on the anchor desk set to the weatherman in a purple suit doing his weird gesturing dance in front of the green screen to my interview on the white leather couch set with a giant picture of the book cover behind me and the teleprompters going.
It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen yet everyone was acting like it was normal — which to them of course it was. I could not stop thinking about the Onion News Network and how they (and the print Onion too) take this bizarre “I will now tell you about reality” format that our society has somehow evolved (and which we stopped noticing is actually something people created several generations ago in the context of particular social, cultural and economic norms) — and just put different content into that format than is supposed to be there. Like when people make cake that looks exactly like lasagna or something. There are sort of infinite opportunities for comedy there. Or manipulation.
Then there’s other forms of creativity like Nathan Fielder does with his TV shows. He’s messing with stuff a lot bigger than TV show formats, though it’s possible that maybe that IS all he’s messing with — we’re just so totally absorbed in a TV show mentality that we actually live our real lives like we’re on TV and honestly can’t tell the difference anymore because TV-style narrative is all we ever see or experience, and was what our parents saw and experienced so they taught it to us. There seems to be a lot of other surreal and absurdist comedy and even drama out there; Severance, for example, is really digging into how we decide what is real and what isn’t and what happens when that stuff gets mixed up.
I have a kid in his early 20s who’s been pointing this stuff out to me since he was about 13 – YouTube shows like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Alan Resnick’s work, and others who generate really deep, intense and often extremely funny and terrifying stuff by messing with these very deeply culturally ingrained narrative formats. The Onion News Network definitely fits into this genre. Experimental theater has been playing with this kind of thing for decades also.
CD: You interview so many people in the book about working at The Onion, and I loved getting to be a fly on the wall for office gossip — this is essentially a workplace story, filled with people who have made being smart and being funny the absolute center of their life and finances. But people also get hurt and burnt out by it. After reporting and talking to so many people, do you think about creative labor differently? Should a funny person try to make a living at it?
CW: I keep going back to infrastructure. It’s not so much about whether individuals should try to have a creative career, whether it’s comedy or anything else. It’s that we have an infrastructure that is absolutely brutal to anyone who wants to live a creative life. The United States is vicious and abusive to writers, artists, musicians, anyone who has a calling or talent or desire to do the very very human activity of artistic creation. We treat this (and so many other deeply human things, like the need for connection with others, connection with nature) as frivolous activities one should do as a hobby if at all.
Even the cultural infrastructure has made art into something done by “special” people — or, at least, people without caregiving responsibilities or people who need to make a living. For instance, for writers there is almost no grant or other funding to just sit down and write your book. There are, however, about a million residencies and workshops. But that format is just not accessible to 90% of people who need material assistance to finish a project.
On a simply practical level I would advise any young person who is not independently wealthy to do what I tell my own kids to do: Find some kind of work that pays you as high an hourly rate as you can find so you can cover your expenses and still have time and energy for creative stuff.
CD: Final question: your top three Onion headlines and why? Go.
CW: There are so many and three is not enough, I always have a soft spot for the silly ones though.
1) Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People (Dec 8, 1999)
Even after reading this 50 times it still makes me weep with laughter. When I was a little kid I wanted to be an archaeologist, though in college I only took a couple of classes in the subject. And the classes taught me that archaeological interpretations are very culturally inflected, with finds being interpreted according to whatever their discoverers already believed was true about humanity and gender. For instance, I wrote a paper for a classical archaeology class comparing two different interpretations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were these Demeter-Persephone rituals involving a pit filled with rotting pig meat, into which women would jump and have psychedelic bacchanalian experiences. (I may be getting a couple of different rituals mixed up here, it was a long time ago…) I found two different scholarly interpretations of the ritual – one written by this stuffy 1950s guy, and one by this 1980s feminist scholar, and naturally they were totally different. (The feminist one was correct, of course.)
So I love this headline because it’s making a joke out of the literalism in archaeology. It’s also extremely silly.
2.) Everyone Involved in Pizza’s Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High (Oct 7, 1998)
I went to college in Madison, Wisconsin, where pretty much every restaurant and store downtown and in the student neighborhoods was both staffed by students and patronized by students. Cannabis was very popular. I would not be at all surprised if this headline came out of some Onion writer’s real-life experience.
The story is also one of the best Onion stories ever written.
3.) “Woman Begins to Regret Dating Someone Spontaneous” (Feb 9, 2005)
You have to read the article here also. Especially if you are a woman who has, um, dated someone spontaneous. ●
You can buy Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire here.
About the Interviewer: Christine Driscoll is a podcast producer in Madison, WI. She’s produced shows about The Chippendales, January 6th, and climate change. Her favorite Onion headline is “Nation Unsure Which Candidate's Plan To Destroy The Environment Will Create More Jobs.”
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