sauteeing the media
from Shift Magazine, April 1999

A warm May evening. You're supine on the couch watching a television retrospective on the twentieth century. It's a comfortably familiar format, featuring a gravel-voiced host who promises to take you on a wondrous journey through the events that shaped North American culture. You grin anticipating Nixon's "Checkers" speech and cringe remembering that leisure suit you used to own. As the tragic fate of Reverend Jim Jones's followers is replayed in garish Kodachrome, the announcer solemnly intones, "Anthropomorphic Juice Pitcher Among Dead in Jonestown Cult Suicide."

If you missed the promos, let this suckerpunch serve as your introduction to the subversive sting of The Onion. Infiltrating television in an NBC special this spring that spins off a new book spin-off, Our Dumb Century, the decade old alt.humour newspaper is set to go prime-time mainstream. Though born in print, most know The Onion as the mock-news online zine that makes sport of media conventions and the pre-millennial culture which -- and on which -- they feed. With a sharp tongue and tart wit, it is the leading organ of satire in our -- or at least the closest thing we have to it.

Focusing on the inanities of consumerism ("RC Cola Celebrates 10th Purchase"), infotainment ("Entertainment Tonight Acquires Exclusive Preview Footage") and current events ("Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes"), The Onion speaks the Esperanto of the famously disenfranchised Generation X. Its weekly dispatches, delivered in note-for-note parodies of the staid Associated Press news style, are gleefully devoured by the jaded young-adult ranks, whose intimate familiarity with media hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and The Newsroom has conditioned them to pick up on the cues.

"We're more media-savvy today for no other reason than the media are self-obsessed, and we've grown up with them," says Scott Dikkers, The Onion's one-time cartoonist and long-time editor-in-chief. In 1989, Dikkers, Peter Haise (then production head, now president and publisher) and a since-departed third partner bought the paper from its founders, two University of Wisconsin students, who decided to bail after the first year turned out to be more work than they'd bargained for. Dikkers gradually refined The Onion's voice and content, focusing on fake news with a sprinkling of Lampoon-style gags, hoaxes and Weekly World News take-offs. In 1995, bored with the sophomoric college humour, he decided to try straight news parody.

With now-signature headlines such as "Perky 'Canada' Has Own Government, Laws" and "High-Definition Television Promises Sharper Crap," the result was a detached, postmodern attack on the stolid practices of modern news media, and the cultural obsessions they champion. The reference points were easily recognizable to any newspaper reader: The Onion's "publisher," 130-year-old T. Herman Zweibel, opining in a vocabulary circa 1911; "StatShots" aping USA Today's Technicolor pyrotechnics; a man-on-the street feature, "What Do You Think," quoting the same six people each week. A "Point-Counterpoint" editorial once lampooned the pro-con polarity of news debate by pitting a humidifier against a dehumidifier in an impassioned argument about humidity. The paper also took delicious pleasure in mocking the journalistic crutch of deferring to experts, citing authorities such "leading puppet psychologist Dr. Gary Wisniewski" and "H. Nelson Brubaker, author of Why We Refill: The American Soda Experience Examined." To bolster the credibility of this parallel news universe, the editors ran doctored photos of people and events.

The Onion's voice grew stronger and louder as editions appeared in Chicago, Denver and Milwaukee, along with the Madison, Wisconsin, flagship (now distributed throughout the U.S. by Barnes & Noble and Borders). Then, in 1996, The Onion went digital. It was an inspired move. The Onion's wink-and-snark tone proved a perfect fit with the irreverent attitudes of internet cognoscenti. Despite no promotion, some 200,000 online denizens were soon making weekly pilgrimages to www.theonion.com. The heavy traffic, solid content and clean design earned the publication Cool Site of the Year award (for Cool writing) in 1997. The mainstream media, which had largely ignored the paper version, quickly glommed onto a net phenomenon. Dikkers -- who says he "can barely operate a computer"-- was given spot No. 43 in Time's "Top 50 Cyber Elites" last year, and Our Dumb Century inspired a bidding war that netted Dikkers and company a $450,000 (U.S.) advance.

* * *

Scott Dikkers presides over the growing Onion media empire from behind a messy, cast-iron desk in a downtown Madison office. Crammed among overflowing garbage cans and surrounded by a sea of kitsch toils a staff of fifty, including eight writers.

Given The Onion's sharp flavour, you might expect its svengali to be a cynical slacker whose every sentence is bookended by ironic quotation marks. So it comes as something of a shock when Dikkers turns out to be a polite, sincere, self-effacing thirty-three-year-old; the kind of guy who accepted the Cool Site award -- the online equivalent of an Emmy -- in a borrowed sweater. Dikkers, moreover, is the living stereotype of an enterprising, multimedia Renaissance man. During his ten years at the paper, he's been supplementing his salary by writing comedy sketches for National Public Radio, doing voice-over work and pursuing film projects. (Spaceman, a saga of an alien-reared killing machine in search of its identity that he wrote and directed, won the Audience Award at the 1997 Austin Film Festival.)

Dikkers trots out a predictable list of childhood comedic influences: pulp comics, Mad Magazine, David Letterman and Monty Python. Lately, he has taken to including mavericks such as the late Andy Kaufman, whose meta-comedy commented on the medium of stand-up itself. "It's a very Gen-X thing to do, to be cynical about the very medium you're writing in," he observes.

This generational conceit is, in fact, a key divide that separates The Onion from its satirical contemporaries and forerunners alike. Mocking the mechanics, cliches and conventions of the Information Age, the publication takes the absurdities of the innumerable television shows, movies and newspaper stories we've ingested and refracts them back with a subtextual commentary that echoes our attitudes toward them. As such, The Onion is the highwater mark of the media-fatigue backlash that began with the McLuhanesque court jesters of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Sprite's anti-advertising "Obey Your Thirst" campaign‹except that while MST3000 and Sprite merely deferred to their audience's biases, The Onion explicitly jabs at the media that generated them.

This focus on the media is certainly a long way from the ambitions of satire past. In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift's tracts weaved in his views on morality, religion and politics at a time when merely writing satire was a political act. (Swift published his biting pamphlets, including A Modest Proposal, anonymously or under the pseudonym M.B. Drapier.) The satiric persona honed by Swift, and later by Mark Twain, was that of the moral man forced to speak out against stupidity and evil - - a conservative who wanted to bring back a golden age. Swift's and Twain's pamphlets and novels tried to rescue a world spiralling out of control, their authors driven by an unshakable confidence in the invincibility of intelligence.

The late twentieth century presents a very different climate for satire. Today, morality is rarely at issue, and the perspective is less likely to be conservative than net-populist Libertarian (as reflected in The Onion's views on marijuana and sexuality.) And, unlike its predecessors, The Onion's satiric persona obscures the byline not for fear of censure but as a comment on the era of the pundit. Says Dikkers, "We aim to be a parody of a major newspaper as vessel of incontrovertible truth handed down from on high and written by teams of expert reporters so objective they may as well be robots."

The goals of satire have also been scaled down to suit an age of irony -- a blunt instrument that trades satrie's outrage for a knowing smirk. A prodding for a comment on Swift's belief that writing satire is in part about "public spirit, prompting men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they are able" elicits laughter from Dikkers. "I'm not trying to mend the world. We're total procrastinating losers," says. "All we do is say what we think, but that's a really easy job. Generation X is cynical and very afraid of doing something genuine or demonstrating a heartfelt belief in a cause or a person. Our calling is to say what we see is wrong. We're not made to do anything about it."

The Onion straddles the line between the satirical frown and the ironic wink: For every comment on the sorry state of the world ("New York to Install Special 'Infants Only' Dumpsters"), there is an empty rejoinder ("Clinton Makes Collage for Best Friend"). The message is politically and socially relevant enough to invoke recognition and identification, but not so incendiary as to alienate readers by shaming them into action. This formula has certainly proven more successful than those of The Onion's peers: Spy magazine folded in 1998; Might collapsed in August of 1997; the National Lampoon's heartbeat is frighteningly irregular. As the field dwindles and dumbs down, The Onion can now boast of being the only publication committed to media satire that takes chances. (Dikkers has repeatedly refused offers to work for the sitcom and movie factories of L.A. and New York.) And despite his slacker posture, Dikkers admits to occasionally getting worked up about the inanity around him. "Some writers are driven by rage and disgust, but for me it's more frustration and sadness. But I have my moments."

Thankfully, Dikkers' self-professed apathy does not preclude a dystopian dream or two. "I want The Onion to become the only vessel of truth in America," he declares only half-jokingly. "I want to drive The New York Times and USA Today out of business, so that when Joe Citizen gets up in the morning and grabs his morning paper off the front stoop, it's The Onion."

The Onion as the newspaper of record. Sounds like the ultimate Onion headline -- or is that punchline?