Riding Out the ‘90s

In exchange for great pay, TV comedy writers face one giant occupational hazard--the inability to say whatever they want. Go ahead and bemoan how cruddy sitcoms are, but you try writing something genuinely funny with the network notes and the advertisers and the star egos to contend with. Interviewed recently on National Public Radio, Alan Ball noted that much of the juicy vitriol in his Golden Globe-nominated screenplay for “American Beauty” grew out of the frustration he was feeling as a comedy writer in a far more confining context--on the sitcoms “Grace Under Fire” and “Cybill.”

Is it any wonder then, that some of the most daring and incisive humor originates these days far from the TV factories of New York or L.A., on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in the shadows of the Wisconsin Capitol? Here, six writers make their voices heard via old-fashioned newsprint and the newfangled Internet. They each earn around $25,000 a year--which, in left-leaning Madison, is more than enough to lead a relatively fulfilling life of intense self-hatred, depression and good Indian food.

“If we were on TV we’d be canceled,” says Rob Siegel, editor of the Onion. He says this with a certain prideful relish: The Onion doesn’t have TV-sized ratings, but at the Onion the writer is king. One is a former dishwasher, another an ex-liquor store clerk. The paper’s senior writer is also the curator of the Museum of Bathroom Tissue, which she runs out of her Madison apartment (strictly on a volunteer basis).

They are people, in other words, who came to professional comedy writing organically--without an agent, without ever doing lunch. Together, they create the weekly newspaper the Onion, a straight-faced satire of USA Today, complete with national and world news, colorful charts, man-on-the-street interviews, trend stories and local news. What began humbly, as an underground goof, today has an audience in the neighborhood of 1 million people, including 520,000 visitors per week to the Web site alone. The former dishwasher and the liquor store clerk and the toilet paper museum curator are these days much admired in Hollywood comedy circles. They are also the winner of the 1999 Thurber Prize for American Humor and the best-selling co-authors of the 1999 humor book “Our Dumb Century,” which re-imagined the 20th century with the Onion as the newspaper of record, reporting on such landmark events as the sinking of the Titanic (“World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg”) and the JFK as sassination (“Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons”).

There’s another book due this spring, called “The Onion’s Finest News Reporting, Vol. 1,” while the Web site continues to build the Onion’s “brand,” to use the parlance of today’s crowded multimedia marketplace.

“I’d say it’s the best comedy product being made in America,” says Bob Odenkirk, a comedian and writer. Odenkirk says he heard about the Onion five years ago from comedian Emo Philips, who says he heard about it from comedian Weird Al Yankovic. For regular surfers of the Web, the Onion is an old story too. But the paper’s content still largely flies under the comedy radar. TV sitcoms and movies rule that industry, even in their heavily compromised--and corporatized--state.

That dominance won’t change, but as the proposed Time Warner-AOL merger suggests, the Internet could emerge as a genuine content competitor. For all the dreck in cyberspace, the Web is ideally suited for a pure comedic voice like the Onion’s. Comedy on TV, after all, has to sidestep any number of sacred cows. But at the Onion there are none. “Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying,” the newspaper announced, in a story that quoted a Columbine High School football player saying: “We have begun the long road to healing. We’re bouncing back, more committed than ever to ostracizing those who are different.” Such humor may offend, but it’s also on point: Despite the tragic shootings that occurred at the school, student cliques are inevitable. As it often does, the Onion speaks real truths by mocking accepted ones. Some recent headlines:

“God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy: ‘No,’ Says God.”

“Study: Children of Divorce Twice as Likely to Write Bad Poetry.”

“U.S. Breaks Off Relations With Chad.”

Subhead: “He’s Just Not the Same When He Drinks, Says Clinton.”

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Since 1996, the year in which https://www.theonion.com was launched and Internet infamy ensued, the paper has become less of an unknown, underground voice firing comedic manifestoes from some unpublished address in the heartland. In 1999 alone, the Onion had the best-selling “Our Dumb Century,” signed a radio deal with Westwood One to syndicate mock news bites--now heard in 72 markets across the country--and enjoyed lofty praise with spreads in the New Yorker and Wired magazines. The walls at Onion headquarters are dotted with tributes from the established entertainment world: a $300 check from “The Chris Rock Show” for 500 back copies, an 8-by-10 thumbs-up from film critic Roger Ebert.

In addition to the 520,000 weekly Web visitors, Onion publisher Peter Hiase puts the paper’s hard-copy readership at 200,000--a staggering increase from the early days. Those days began in 1989, when Hiase and Scott Dikkers purchased, for about $16,000, what was then just a slim sheet of gags circulating among the pizza joints and bars on State Street. Recent University of Wisconsin graduates, they became the paper’s publisher and editor in chief, respectively. Hiase was the entire business side, waking up at 5:30 in the morning to get copies distributed while holding down a bartending job. Meanwhile, Dikkers, a confirmed loner and prolific cartoonist and comedy writer, wrote stories, drew strips and recruited various miscreant associates into the anarchic, $5-a-story world of grass-roots humor newspaper work.

Today, Hiase and Dikkers preside over a quirky little media empire that has its feet planted in publishing, radio and the Internet, where banner ads brought in $1.3 million last year, says Hiase. Because TV is supposed to be in the “fresh voices” business too, HBO and then NBC have flirted with bringing the Onion to TV--specifically, with a special based on “Our Dumb Century.” At NBC, the project ultimately died from a lack of interest. But figures from an audit of the Onion’s Web audience, provided by Hiase, show that the Onion has a desirable TV demographic--albeit in miniature: a median age of 30, 70% male and 30% female.

“There are so few true comedy voices that when you find one you need to stop and listen and figure out how to broaden its audience,” says Bridget Potter, the former NBC executive who worked on the Onion special. “If you do it the right way, if you do it intelligently, it works. I’m convinced they can move into television.”

There is, it seems, a clock ticking. Will the Onion be gobbled up by some larger multimedia entity? Will it become a national magazine or wind up on cable TV? Will the writers leave to work for TV or the movies, the way the National Lampoon became a training ground two decades before it?

For now, the Onion’s failure to be anything other than the Onion is reassuring to those who treasure it.

“They’re like a great corner store that you hope doesn’t get turned into a Starbucks,” says Conan O’Brien, host of NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

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An Onion news meeting takes place in what looks like a bombed-out dorm lounge. The carpet is gross, the furniture is beat-up and shapeless. A desk drawer overflows with ketchup packets. There’s a Herbert Hoover action figure on a crowded bookshelf, and a poster of a shirtless Erik Estrada on one wall.

This is where the five members of the Onion’s writing staff congregate to reduce hundreds of potential headlines to the 20 or so stories, charts and briefs that appear in the paper each week. They gather early in the afternoon and work into the night, overseen by editor Siegel and, more spiritually, Onion founding father Dikkers.

Unlike the Harvard Lampoon, which for two decades has been sending sitcom writers to L.A. as if by shuttle, the Onion is not staffed by careerist Ivy Leaguers with designs on a staff job in Hollywood. For one thing, the Onion isn’t a college newspaper. For another, the Onion’s writers aren’t students.

Most attended the University of Wisconsin and then simply stayed in Madison, a place Onion head writer Todd Hanson calls “The Second City of Slack” (behind Austin, Texas). Together, they form an Algonquin Roundtable of late-20s and early-30s Brainiac ironists formerly employed in the local service sector. Before joining the Onion full time, senior editor Carol Kolb “washed the elderly” at a Madison convalescent hospital. Hanson washed dishes; John Krewson was the liquor store clerk. Maria Schneider worked as a teller at a credit union, and Tim Harrod, among other things, sold vacuum cleaners door to door.

The atmosphere here is thick with cutting arrogance, bad posture and dubious eating habits. But the only creative constraints are style points, and the Onion writers arbitrate ideas with a tough but agreeably democratic touch. Nobody gets a byline (the paper is the star), and everybody has to write in the seamless monotone of newspaperese, to maintain the humor’s straight face. Within that formula, anything can be news. “Area Man Had No Idea There Was So Much to Know About Buying a Sofa.” This is local news. So is “Crazy Man Announces Plans to Stand in Doorway, Yell at Cars All Day.”

“Most news outlets pretend that the world makes sense, that it can be quantified and objectively reported,” Dikkers has said of the Onion. “Whereas we all know the world is a totally absurd, whacked-out place.”

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It’s a Tuesday in November, and these are some of the stories the Onion is pursuing:

“Clinton Blows Entire Paycheck.”

“Mass Graves: Are They Really More Cost-Effective?”

“Anti-Racism Law Mutates Into Newer, Stronger Form of Racism.”

“Area Man Dying to Tell Someone His Cool Password.”

“Russian TV Scores Huge Hit With ‘Who Wants to Eat a Meal?’ ”

A satire of the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” craze, this last entry will end up as the week’s lead story. Mike Loew, the Onion’s photo and graphics guru, heads up State Street to the University of Wisconsin campus and returns with good news: Someone in the Russian studies department has agreed to mock up a “Who Wants to Eat a Meal?” sign in Cyrillic, the Slavic alphabet. A week after the issue appears, “Saturday Night Live” features an awfully similar joke--a sketch featuring a Kosovar contestant competing on a game show called “Who Wants to Eat?” This arouses much suspicion around the Onion offices. But beating other comedy factories to the punch isn’t an Onion preoccupation. Nor is being topical, really. The Onion looks at the surface sameness of topical humor on television and expresses its view, naturally, in a headline: “Leno, Kevorkian Sign 10-Year Monologue Joke Pact.”

The Onion’s sensibility is rooted not in the news of the day but in local news, in stories that elevate the banality of ordinary life to a newsworthy significance. In this, the Onion writers use their former minimum-wage lives as inspiration. “Worker Told to Have Fun Operating Shake Machine” is typical Onion terrain. So are the “Area Man” stories: “Is Area Man Going to Finish Those Fries?” Or “Area Bar Used to Be Cool; Now Lame.”

Former Onion editor Dan Vebber, now a writer on the animated Fox series “Futurama,” calls this “humor of the small.” “It’s about celebrating the boring,” says Vebber, who has also written for the WB’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” He looks around at what sitcoms are doing and thinks they could all learn a lesson from the Onion. They could infuse humor with something resembling the texture of daily life. It’s why people called “Seinfeld” a show about nothing. Why “The Simpsons” is now in its 11th season.

Vebber, Ben Carlin, Rich Daum and Sean LaFleur are the Onion’s official graduating class; several years ago, they traded in their low-paying lives in Madison for L.A., where the Onion name now carries weight. They promptly signed a development deal at 20th Century Fox Television. Out of this came “Deadline Now,” a 1997 Fox pilot that attempted to spoof TV news in the same way the Onion satirizes USA Today. Back in Madison, Dikkers and the others watched the fate of “Deadline Now” with a mixture of curiosity and dread. But the pilot never made it onto Fox’s schedule.

Since then, Carlin has joined the writing staff of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and Vebber is at “Futurama.” As a group, they are still hoping to create a sitcom. All in all, it’s a weightless experience.

Vebber, who’s from a Milwaukee suburb, looks back on his days at the Onion and says, somewhat sheepishly: “It’s baffling how different the work ethic is here from the Midwest. We’ve taken big paychecks for doing very little work.”

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Cloistered back in Madison, like comedy’s version of the Amish, the Onion writers have medical and dental these days, and publisher Hiase is talking about stock appreciation rights. But they are not above grousing about pay. Two years of work on “Our Dumb Century” brought bonuses of a few thousand dollars, they say, even though the two-book deal with Crown netted some $450,000.

Still, none of them ever expected to get rich doing this. Being funny in Madison is what seems to suit them for now. “We have all postponed leaving because we realize there’s not going to be another situation that is this pure,” says Hanson, who has been at the Onion for almost a decade.

Ranks at the Onion are tightly closed--some say too closed, fearing that five or six writers, however talented, will inevitably burn out. Several regular correspondents contribute material, but turnover (with the exception of the Onion guys in Hollywood) is rare, and hundreds, if not thousands, of weekly submissions are dismissed out of hand.

“We don’t know how to hire people based on resumes and cover letters,” says editor Siegel.

A native New Yorker and University of Michigan grad, Siegel followed a girlfriend to Madison five years ago. His relationship with the Onion has lasted longer.

“There’s a certain outsider sensibility that you get from being here,” he says, interviewed in his cramped office. Outside lies State Street--a college-town artery lined by bookstores, used-record shops and a sandwich place called the Radical Rye. In something of an Onion tradition, Siegel, 28, is the lone Jew on staff--the lone Jew surrounded by a collection of lapsed Lutherans and lapsed Catholics from the Midwest.

“We’re free to look upon things going on on the coasts with disdain and disgust,” Siegel says. “We’re not tied up in any politics, we’re not making friends with anybody that we’re afraid to make fun of.”

With deadlines hanging over them, the Onion writers agree one afternoon to form a kind of encounter group, discussing who they are and how they got here. Harrod, the newest member of the staff, immediately objects to the “guy-in-the-basement description” from his colleagues. He is 31, blond and looks a little bit like actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. According to his Web site, he weighs 238 pounds.

“The five years before I moved here was about coping with depression, and slowly, slowly crawling out of a ditch,” he says.

Throughout Harrod’s sad-sack story, the other Onion writers laugh. They laugh because Harrod embodies an “Onion type”--socially awkward and a bit strange, but covertly hilarious. Krewson, who writes the horoscopes, confesses to being a kleptomaniac, albeit an eccentric one. He’s stolen taxidermy, he says, and the Taco Bell Customer Bill of Rights. Deceptively prim Maria Schneider writes two columns--one from mythical publisher emeritus T. Herman Zweibel, the other ostensibly from Herbert Kornfeld, a foulmouthed accounts-receivable manager. Carol Kolb is the curator of the Museum of Bathroom Tissue, where the most impressive item is the industrial-sized roll from Ellis Island.

“Carol lives her comedy,” says Hanson, her boyfriend. Bearded, with long hair, he is the Onion’s most outgoing depressive. All week, he kvells about an e-mail correspondence with one of his comedy-writer heroes, Merrill Markoe, to be published in the online magazine slate.com. Hanson can’t believe his good fortune. But misery is always around the corner. Hanson, in fact, seems to embody one of his own headlines: “Man Who Lost All Hope Loses Last Additional Bit of Hope He Didn’t Know He Had.”

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But nobody personifies the Onion’s distrust of the outside world more than Dikkers, the Onion’s founding editor and guardian of the franchise. With his shaved head and wiry frame, and a voice of unnerving calm, Dikkers could easily be up to no good. At 34, he has already fashioned his own canon of anti-humor. He’s made a movie (“Spaceman,” in which a boy abducted at birth by aliens returns to Earth as an adult and takes a job as a supermarket checkout clerk), and authored six books of underground cartoons called “Jim’s Journal.” He’s done all this without ever leaving Madison. These days, Dikkers is busy with Onion-related projects (the Onion Radio News segments, two CDs and the new book). But he’s also writing feature spec scripts under a deal at Palm Pictures.

Dikkers lives in Waterloo, 30 minutes outside Madison, and is notoriously reclusive. For a time he was married, but people at the Onion swear they didn’t know it.

“J.D. Salinger, I admire that life greatly,” Dikkers says.

In 1989, Dikkers played a hunch, putting up $1,000 as a down payment for the Onion, which had been founded by Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, who now publish, respectively, alternative weeklies in Seattle and Albuquerque. For a time the Onion was just a hodgepodge of Dikkers’ cartoons, Spy magazine-like satire and short fiction. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, then-chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, was an early Onion target. They called her “queen of the flying monkeys.” They published a Donna Shalala nude issue (Shalala sent the Onion a copy, autographed).

Between 1989 and 1995, the Onion, which is wrapped around a larger alternative weekly distributed for free in Madison, Chicago, Milwaukee and Denver, grew modestly. But the revolution is widely attributed to two moves: the creative decision, in 1995, to embrace the USA Today conceit--colorizing the pages, modulating the look and writing every story as if it were spit from the same Associated Press machine--and the launch, a year later, into cyberspace.

As recounted by Liesl Schillinger in Wired magazine, the jump to the Internet was prompted by a pre-Web story written by Siegel. It was headlined “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia: Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to Be First Recipients.” Soon, the “Operation Vowel Storm” story was being appropriated by a wide variety of media figures, from the hosts of National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” to Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign staff, who ran it on the Go Pat Go Web site. The story wasn’t attributed to the Onion because nobody knew what the Onion was.

The Web site has changed that equation. Now, when Onion stories are pilfered, waves of e-mail alert the folks back in Madison. The proprietary interest shared by Onion fans is encouraging, particularly in a medium so prone to publicly authored humor, where jokes are distributed widely via e-mail with little regard for authorship. That’s not to say that the Onion’s stories aren’t still misinterpreted by those who either haven’t heard of the paper or don’t get its humor. Shortly after the birth of the McCaughey septuplets in Iowa, for instance, the Onion published a story headlined: “Chinese Woman Gives Birth to Septuplets: Has One Week to Choose.” The story went on to say that “in accordance with Chinese multiple-birth law,” six of the infants would be tossed off a mountain. Via e-mails, the Onion learned that anguished churchwomen were holding prayer vigils.

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Over beers at Stillwater’s, a Madison bar, Hiase, his blond hair spiked pink these days, looks at the future of the Onion, his now-profitable enterprise, and sees nothing but blue skies. The 32-year-old Onion publisher sees a national magazine that would parody Newsweek. He sees some kind of television show. He sees a further explosion in licensing--more Onion mugs, more T-shirts, more calendars, more posters. In his fantasy, the posters would decorate every college dorm in America.

“Instead of the Heather Locklear, partially naked one,” he says, “they would have an Onion poster.”

While Hiase flits between the paper’s Milwaukee and Chicago business headquarters, dreaming of bigger and better days for what he calls “Mother Onion,” the writers lead their lives of ironic distance in Madison, cringing a bit at their publisher’s unbridled salesmanship. Talk of a national magazine, of a TV show, is met with chagrined looks by the underpaid and overworked comedy writers in the trenches, who are treading water just to keep the weekly newspaper up to their own exacting standards.

With his own production deal at NBC, Conan O’Brien is in a position to foist the Onion onto a new platform. And yet, he says, the Onion is best left to its own mischievous devices. He says this from experience. As an undergraduate at Harvard, O’Brien wrote for the famed Harvard Lampoon; since then, his ascension on the show-business ladder has involved a certain loss of innocence.

“In college I was writing comedy about the French Resistance . . . [where] today I would think, ‘Well, I’m not going to indulge myself.’ That’s what’s good about the Onion. This is a place where you can get comedy unedited.”

But it is not difficult to envision a future in which the Onion is an underground voice with a corporate parent. Lately, there has been interest with Jerry Bruckheimer Films for both a feature and series TV deal, among other phone calls coming into the office of David Miner, the Onion’s New York-based manager.

Dikkers, for his part, dismisses talk that the Onion is on the verge of selling its soul. “In this day and age, a groundbreaking comedian like Dennis Miller can do commercials for a long-distance service,” he says. “The whole world is a sellout now. I don’t think it’s any big deal.”

But every now and then the writers get a taste of the creative life outside the protective womb. Recently, for instance, the Onion was commissioned to put together a front page of the future for Newsweek magazine. “Christians Growing Impatient for Third Coming of Christ,” one of the headlines said. It was funny, everyone thought, but Newsweek got nervous, and the headline never made it to press.

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THE STAFF

Todd Hanson

Job description: Head writer

Previous post held: Dishwasher

Comedy writer heroes include: Merrill Markoe.

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Rob Siegel

Job description: Editor

Guiding principle: “We’re free to look upon things going on on the coasts with disdain and disgust.”

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Carol Kolb

Job description: Senior writer

Previous post held: Curator, Museum of Bathroom Tissue (now shuttered).

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Maria Schneider

Previous post held: Credit union teller

Alter egos: Publisher emeritus T. Herman Zweibel and middle manager Herbert Kornfeld.

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Mike Loew

Job description: Graphics and photo guru

In the works: The forthcoming book “Tough Call,” a collection of phone pranks.

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John Krewson

Job description: Writes horoscopes

Previous post held: Liquor store clerk

Embarrassing admission: Has stolen taxidermy.

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Tim Harrod

Job description: The new guy

Previous post held: Door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman

Want to know more?: See https://www.timharrod.com

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Scott Dikkers

Job description: Father figure

Extending the brand: Onion Radio News, two CDs and a new book

Why?: “The whole world is a sellout now. I don’t think it’s any big deal.”