Feature

"Terrorist Bomb Not Defused in Thrilling, Suspense-Packed Final Minutes"

"Cop Kills Own Partner, Vows to Track Self Down"

These are just a few of the headlines you will find in The Onion, a US-based underground, satirical newspaper that calls itself "America's Finest News Source."

From its modest beginnings in 1988 as a small-town newspaper parodying USA Today, and its move to the Web in 1996, The Onion has been gaining popularity. An October 1998 article in The Washington Post called The Onion "an antidote to hype and, oddly enough, a voice of reason."

Full of edgy, often controversial headlines, The Onion is laced with unhappy, hard-hitting truths about the state of the world:

"NYPD Apologizes For Accidental Shooting-Clubbing-Stabbing-Firebombing Death"

"Nation's Educators Alarmed By Poorly Written Teen Suicide Notes"

But it is also filled with silly humour about the banality of everyday life:

"Area Stoner Regales Other Stoners with Tale of Amazing Super Bong He Saw in Iowa City Once"

"Picture At Party Comes Out Great"

"New Old People Magazine Gives Old People Something To Read While Waiting To Die"

Onion Head Writer Todd Hanson, who is based in the paper's Madison, Wisconsin office, was suffering from a bout of writer's block when I asked him what it takes to write for The Onion. In a voice that could have been destined for radio or television he explains that real, hard-hitting humour most often stems from the sadder realities of life.

Writer's Block: Why is The Onion called The Onion?

Todd Hanson: Well, there are many theories. We originally heard from Scott Dikkers [co-publisher] many times, that The Onion was twenties or thirties old-time journalism slang, newspaperman slang for a juicy news story with multiple layers that could be pulled back etcetera, etcetera. But The Washington Post guy, when he asked us that question, wrote that any working journalist knows that that is not true. So, perhaps it isn't. I don't know. He kind of blew the lid off that story. I generally think that it's a dadaist nonsense word. The two guys who started it originally [Tim Keck and Chris Johnson] claimed that they named it that because when they were working on the paper they were so poor they were eating Onion sandwiches. Doesn't that sound a little too pat to be true? So I don't generally believe that that one is true either.

WB: What does the role of Head Writer entail?

TH: Basically, what that entails is that for the last nine years or so, I've been writing for The Onion. That whole time, it was not anybody's full-time job except the editor's and so I was washing dishes and I was working as a cashier, the third shift at convenience stores. Finally, after going on-line and becoming more popular, they decided that they could give people full-time jobs, and I got a full-time job. I was able to quit my day job, which was, by that time, not washing dishes, but answering phones at an answering service for doctors. This was like two years ago. So, for the nine years that I worked there, for seven of them, it's just been something I was doing in my spare time after my day job so that I didn't feel completely worthless about my life. When they hired me, they said "What do you want to be?" and I said "I like the sound of Head Writer." But it doesn't really mean anything. I'm not the head of anything. They just call me the Head Writer because of the writers, I've been around the longest. And I also tend to write more than the other writers.

WB: So you don't have any kind of editorial say?

TH: I don't have any kind of editorial say. I'm afraid to say. I have editorial say within the writer's meetings but the editor has final say.

WB: When did you submit your first story?

TH: The staff of The Onion has never really been like a staff where you get a job by submitting stuff like that. There's no resumé review process. Well, I guess there would be now, if we were hiring new people. We on The Onion writing staff think of ourselves as a rock 'n' roll band. It formed organically over time from friend to friend. Most of the people on the original Onion staff were friends before they were on The Onion staff together. So, it wasn't like someone said "We need the following five positions." It formed in a natural way.

WB: What's your educational background?

TH: I attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1986 to 1986.

WB: Did you have any journalistic experience?

TH: I was around a lot of the J-school students because I did a daily cartoon for the Daily Cardinal, which is one of the campus papers. The Daily Cardinal was a place where many of us originally started as cartoonists. So I was around J-school students, but that's not the same thing as having journalistic experience. So the answer to your question is no.

WB: What program did you enrol in?

TH: Journalism. Actually, I had an undeclared major but I had a journalism scholarship from my little high school, which was like $200 or something. But I never got far enough along to even need to declare a major.

WB: What I'd really like to know is how you come up with story ideas.

TH: We have a subscription to Ideas magazine, which we find to be a very helpful source in brainstorming. We kind of flip through it; we have it alphabetically indexed. We just look down different topics we need ideas about ... it's a great service. I'd recommend it to all your readers.

WB: [Laughter]

TH: Seriously? We assemble pitch lists for brainstorming meetings of 25 or 50 ideas. We submit them to the meeting. They're read out loud. The ones that get laughs are circled. Probably 5 out of every 25 or less — 5 out of 50 — get circled. Those go on a master list of thousands of jokes and then from those, and I mean literally thousands and thousands of 'em — very fine print headlines, maybe 20 or 30 of them are chosen. And then the ideas that go into the paper are culled by the writers and also by the editors in an additional round of elimination from that master list each week. So, we estimate that for every joke in the paper, there's probably 100 or more that are rejected.

WB: Are these meetings hysterical?

TH: They used to be really fun. I remember back in my dishwashing days, I used to really look forward to them because I would hate my job and would love coming into The Onion on Tuesday nights to have fun. We just laughed and laughed. But over time, it has become more of a chore, and we did do that book [Our Dumb Century; Three Rivers Press, 1999], which was a real chore because we had to keep doing the paper at the same time.

WB: You don't find working there as funny or stimulating as it used to be?

TH: We still manage to have fun, but during the two years we were doing the book there was so much of a workload that everybody was becoming bitter. You have to understand that comedy seems to be based on self-hatred or self-loathing. The comedic personality of most of the comedy-creating people that I've met seems to be that way so sometimes it can get really hairy psychologically in terms of the staff. During the two years we were doing the book I remember people were just miserable; everybody hated each other. People were getting into huge fights. It wasn't particularly fun. And then we had to do the paper every week on top of the extra workload we had from the book so meetings started becoming not fun at all. But in recent months we've been trying to have more fun with it again.

WB: How are you assigned the stories? Are you given any direction in terms of how the story should turn out?

TH: Everything at The Onion is done collaboratively. The assembling of the lists is done collaboratively, because we make the decisions in a group. The selection process is the same way, and even the writing process, to an extent, is the same way because we have a brainstorming session where everyone shouts ideas of directions in which the stories could go. Eventually it comes down to one writer who writes the story; however, the story they are writing may be based on a headline they didn't write. They may write a headline and someone else writes the story. Most importantly, after they write the story, our editor will rewrite it as arbitrarily as he feels a need to.

WB: Where do the names and photos in the stories come from?

TH: They just come from us. We try to think of names that are funny without being too corny. However, we started noticing, among the many arbitrary changes our editor was making, one thing he always does is change the names. We couldn't figure out why. Why would he feel a need to change every name? Eventually we found out that in an effort to make realistic sounding names, for some reason, he felt that the names in his high-school yearbook sounded more real than the names of people that we know or have met.

WB: And the photos?

TH: The photos are all from a service. For the ones that we need to create, we have a photographer who takes a photo of a model. Then we have a graphic artist who uses Photoshop to alter the photos.

WB: What is your specialty?

TH: As I was saying about the comedic personality being based on misery, I generally tend to pursue the sort of feel that the funniest things come from the most miserable things. In other words, if you pushed that equivalency up to its furthest extremes, you end up with laughter coming up from sorrow, but really funny laughter, really side-splitting, overwhelming humour coming from things that are really, really horrifying.

WB: Can you give me an example?

TH: I guess I can give you an example just in my own life. I have spent most of my adult life in one degree or another dealing with being depressed and having depression really just knock the wind out of me. I guess I've processed those feelings by doing the kind of dark humour that people have come to know The Onion for. I'm a great devotee of black humour. I remember there was one headline we did once that read "Utter Failure to Spend Rest of Day in Bed." It was on the front page and I remember saying "You've got to let me write that one." I even wanted to pose for the picture of the guy. When I wrote the story, I was trying to make it as pathetic and miserable as possible to make it as funny as possible. I was only going to put things in the story that are at least partially autobiographical. I was not going to make anything up. And then I included details of various things that had happened to me like just lying in bed instead of facing the day at various low points in my life. I think it was a funny story but the reason it was funny was because it was honest and it was unhappy.

WB: I see your point. Take for example the headline "Unattractive Man Just Like Brother to Area Woman." It's hilarious but it's also sad.

TH: I think most of the humour in The Onion is sad. I don't even mean that as a joke. Scott Dikkers has said in interviews on more than one occasion that the main body of humour — not that all of our stuff is like this, because we do silly stupid stuff too and there's plenty of low-brow just silliness and dumb jokes in The Onion — but a lot of the humour is designed to be sad and doesn't make us laugh, it makes us cry. But it still counts as jokes because it's structured as comedy. Or maybe it doesn't make us cry, but helps us process feelings that would otherwise make us cry.

WB: Do the people that you work with feel the same way?

TH: I think different people on the writing staff are tortured "artists" to a greater or lesser degree than others. Our editor Rob Siegel seems to be relatively non-tortured emotionally but once you get to know him he is just absolutely weird. He is just psychologically freaked out. The assistant editor, Carol Kolb, seems to be the most stable. But everybody has their own baggage.

WB: Columns by Herbert Kornfeld — do you all share the task of writing those?

TH: I said everything in The Onion is done collaboratively, and it really is — except for the columns. The columns are individual author voices. Herbert Kornfeld (the jive-talking accountant), Jean Teasdale (the home columnist who talks about women's issues), and a cartoon called "Pathetic Geek Stories" (about true-life tales of peoples' geekiness in adolescence) — are written by a woman named Maria Schneider who is just immensely talented and who has a big following. She also writes the T. Herman Zweibel weekly editorial message — the column from the publisher emeritus who's 132 years old. Then there's a column called "Smoove B" that we don't run anymore, but it was very popular as well. It was the love man who in each issue is talking about how he's going to woo this woman over and over again with this smooth Barry White-type talk, and it never works. That was Scott Dikkers writing that. That was actually some of the last contributions he made in terms of writing. And then the column, "The Outside Scoop" by Jackie Harvey, which is a Hollywood gossip column written by someone who doesn't have any connection to Hollywood. That one and Jim Anchower who talks about driving his car around the Midwest; those two columns are also very popular and are written by a writer named Joe Garden who lives in Chicago.

WB: What characteristics should a writer for The Onion have?

TH: I'll tell you one thing. I was eating lunch and this waiter came up and started bantering with us. And I actually thought this guy might make a good Onion writer because he seems to have the right attitude. The reason I felt that is because he seemed to be incredibly bitter and just full of repressed hatred about his job that he was transferring into his banter with us. So we had him write some headlines and they actually turned out to be really good. So, I'm not trying to be glib or something, but I guess pretty much everybody who works at The Onion, almost everyone, is really unstable and apparently they need to process their psychological instability through doing that sort of humour. I don't know whether someone who is completely mentally healthy could do the same thing. I suppose they probably could but I don't know why they would be motivated to.

WB: Happy, stable people need not apply. [Laughter]

TH: Do healthy, stable people ever make any kind of good writers? Everything I've ever read about writing, whether it was about novelists or poetry, or whether it was about anything, by any writer, has always indicated to me that writers tend to be culled from the general population by some kind of need that they have that the other people don't have ... some kind of weakness that they have. Maybe it's kind of naïve. I'm sure there are probably a lot of healthy, stable writers but I don't know what they would write about. Maybe they wouldn't be writing humour. Maybe they'd be writing technical manuals or something.

WB: Then what would you say about the people who appreciate The Onion?

TH: Oh, I think they're just humans. There's a lot of negativity associated with being human and the challenge of being healthy and stable I think is figuring out a way to process it in a non-destructive way; in a way that makes you feel better. When people are laughing out loud at The Onion it makes them feel better, and knowing that they are laughing out loud at The Onion makes me feel better. So, even if the emotions start off as bad or unstable, if they can, through a catharsis experience, translate it into a positive, that's a good thing.

WB: You view writing stories for The Onion as therapeutic.

TH: I do think of black comedy that way, and I think that's what The Onion is. Yeah, I think that's the motivation.

WB: You're suffering from writer's block; do you feel you are unable to come up with story ideas?

TH: No, just unable to take the ideas and run with them and get the stories done. I'm used to cranking out a large amount of material every week for The Onion, but now that we've gotten a little bit of recognition for what we're doing, for the first time, I find myself falling behind in my writing schedule and not getting as much done per week.

WB: Sometimes a change of environment can help. What's your writing environment like?

TH: We have one big central room with a bunch of desks in it that they seem to feel the writers should be able to write in. Well, none of the writers can write in there. The big central room works for our meetings, when we're having oral brainstorming or collaborative meeting discussions. But it's very difficult to have the privacy and solitude that is associated, by pretty much every writer I know, with writing. So everyone has these desks that they don't use. They'll use the computer to go on the Internet and then they'll all try sneaking back at night when no one else is there. I started that because I'm often an insomniac, but now it's gotten to the point where we're all trying to sneak in when no one else is there, so everyone keeps surprising each other. Because we have a non-smoking office, and I'm a smoker, my real writing environment for the two and a half years that I've been working full-time for The Onion has been in one of the stair towers. I actually pushed a desk out into there, and I would sit in the stairs smoking and writing in longhand because I couldn't put a computer out there. Eventually, after about eight months — it was a great eight months — they said "There are fire regulations, you can't have a desk out here." So I pushed the desk out and just put my papers directly on the floor. So now what I do is just sit on the stairs and use the landing in front of me as kind of a desk in the dead of night just smoking and writing.

WB: How long do you see yourself writing for The Onion?

TH: Well, I don't know how to do anything else except wash dishes and answer phones. I never really was very good at answering the phones.

WB: You're at a cocktail party and someone asks what you do for a living.

TH: Right there, your premise is all off because we wouldn't be at a cocktail party. We're so isolated in Madison; we don't ever hang out with any literary people. I have been described as someone who fears the surface dwellers. And to a greater or lesser extent that applies to some of the others. Occasionally we'll meet new people but it's not like we live these terribly extroverted lives. So that doesn't really happen. I would love it if I started meeting people who said "Oh, you write for The Onion. How impressive." That would be great, but that's not anything that happens now.

WB: What's important about The Onion and what you do?

TH: One of the things about The Onion that I think is important is that it's subversive. I don't know exactly what that means or have a strict definition of what that means, but I think it has a certain amount of subversive content in it. I like that aspect of it. We usually have some kind of message or some kind of point we're trying to make with the humour. Sometimes we'll do something and we'll think, "Oh man, are we ever going to get a lot of hate mail over this." I'm thinking in particular about the story I did about Columbine, about the back to school Columbine features that were being featured all across the mass media about "everything's great in Columbine now." We have this Orwellian atmosphere and we've erased all evidence of the problem, and I just thought it was the most awful news story, trumpeted everywhere as this happy story. I didn't see what was happy about it at all. It was like 1984. We did this story about Columbine; it was on the front page. It was comedy and the headline was "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying." So I was really worried. I really tried to write it in a sensitive way that was not offensive but that was making a valid point. But I was still afraid that there would be all kinds of complaints. Instead, we got a giant outpouring of supportive fan letters. We got 30 or 40 from people saying "This is the funniest thing The Onion has done," or "This is so sad but it's so true. You guys are the first people to tell the truth about this story." I got one letter, from, I think he described himself as an assistant professor of biochemistry at some Ivy League school. He wrote "This is the best piece of writing I have read this year." I guess that's the thing that's the most gratifying about it.

Visit The Onion at www.theonion.com.