by Mike Sacks
My mom didn’t work after having kids and she always felt guilty about this—but also I think she was just afraid to get out there. She started losing her hearing when I was still young and that was part of the reason. Also, we only had one car and my dad took it to work—things like that got in her way. Not that she has ever been diagnosed, but she definitely has some anxiety disorder. At The Onion, I wrote an article called “Area Mom Freaking Out For No Reason Again” [July 22, 1999], as well as several other articles based solely on her. But she also has this dark sense of humor and would say very funny things in a straight, matter-of-fact way.
For instance, after my dad had a heart attack, he would still always be yelling about something, and my mother would mutter under her breath, “How was your heart attack?”
Ultimately, I credit her for my sense of humor.
How did your parents feel about your writing career?
In 2000, when I quit my day job as nurse’s aide at a horrible county psychiatric home to work full-time at The Onion, my mom wasn’t sure that it was a good idea—even though it meant I would no longer have to clean up human shit and get punched in the face. When I moved to New York, she was like, “Oh, no! You have to move to New York?!” I’m not even complaining that my parents aren’t supportive. They are proud of me—they get excited when I am on TV. But my mom is an obsessive worrier and she would rather I have a stable job like my sister who teaches Family and Consumer Sciences Education—the modern equivalent of Home Ec—at a junior high school. And my dad isn’t going to read or watch something just because I wrote it. I sound bitter, but I’m not at all. My parents are great and cute. They just live in their own world centered in Spencer, Wisconsin.
I’m pretty sure none of the other writers in this book have ever worked in a county psychiatric home. What was that experience like?
There were different floors for different types of issues. There was an Alzheimer’s unit. There was one guy, a former police chief, who got Alzheimer’s very young. He was probably only sixty or so and in great shape. It took five of us women to put him in pajamas because he didn’t know what was going on and his natural response was to fight. He would pull these tricky arm bends and foot sweeps on us. Giving him a shower was crazy. His wife would come to visit and just cry. That was sad.
The upper floors were where the real crazies were, younger people with schizophrenia and so on. These people would sometimes manage to get out for a bit, but then would be back in again after swallowing a handful of safety pins or whatever. There was one guy, thirty-five or so, who believed he was a leprechaun. He’d speak in an Irish accent and offer to grant wishes and stand on his head. I loved that he was so classically crazy—if I had read something with that character, it would have seemed like lazy writing. And then there were just a lot of really loud, demanding crazy people who didn’t like to bathe and would get violent very quickly if they wanted a soda and there wasn’t any left.
The bottom floor was for elderly people with dementia. The former drunks were always the worst—they tended to get mean when they lost their minds. There were some people who’d been there long enough so that they didn’t walk or talk anymore. The worst thing was that we had to spoon-feed these people puréed food. I mean, at a certain point it’s time to die—if they were at home they would just stop eating. But the state rules were such that we had to give these poor people three meals and a snack a day—so they lived on and on. Some of them refused to open their mouths. You had to coax them to open their mouths so you could put the mush in. Others naturally opened up their mouths like little birdies. Then there were those who had feeding tubes.
People, make a living will!
How do you think working at the psychiatric institute affected your comedic sensibility?
Well, I think working at a place like that makes you develop a thick skin. You deal with a lot of sad situations and annoying conditions. So I think you learn to not be emotionally affected by things as much. In that way, I think working there made me more able to make fun of “taboo” subjects. People would get so mad about Onion articles that involved certain subjects, whether it was disabled vets or dying babies or whatever. I just wasn’t so emotionally attached to the subject. It’s not that I don’t think certain circumstances or topics were sad or wrong, but to me there’s more than one emotional response beyond sadness or outrage. I can distance myself enough to see what’s funny about other subjects, too.
From what you were saying earlier, high school sounds like it was far from ideal. Was your college experience in the mid-nineties, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in any way an improvement?
Madison was—is—a great city. It’s a very liberal city. It has that classic free weekly paper, Isthmus, filled with stories about lesbians and medical marijuana and public radio. The college is huge, which I loved. Freshman year you could take classes in giant lecture halls and not have to interact with another human all day long.
These days, when I mention I went to the University of Wisconsin, people always mention the Badgers. Football was a huge deal at our college, apparently. I never went to a single game, a single tailgating party, or even watched a game on TV. It was this whole world I never interacted with the entire time I was going to school there. I guess on game days the entire neighborhood around the stadium becomes a sea of red and white, totally taken over by football fans. But I never went to that part of campus. It was all sports bars and jocks and business students living over there.
How did you come into the Onion world?
Madison is small enough that eventually I met people who worked at The Onion. I was putting these silly weird flyers up around town on the kiosks, and Joe Garden, one of the writers, called to say he liked them. Joe had been working at a liquor store on State Street, the main pedestrian street in downtown Madison. He had plastered the windows with funny hand-painted signs. One was a diagram of the brain with arrows pointing to “The Frontal Lobe,” “The Backal Lobe,” and “The Michelob.” The Onion editor at the time, Dan Vebber [later a writer for Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Futurama, Daria], recruited him based on that. Joe ended up working at The Onion for close to twenty years.
So, my neighbor across the hallway went to a couple Onion writer meetings—he didn’t really work out, but after a meeting he brought another one of the staff writers, Todd Hanson, over to a party I was having at my apartment. My apartment was set up like a fake museum. I called it the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue, and it was a curated collection of toilet paper stolen from around the country, presented in a very formal, very pretentious way, with an audio tour and lots of brochures.
I eventually wrote an Onion headline list and it went over well, and I was invited to come to meetings. I fit in right away.
How exactly did the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue start?
It started randomly. When I was a freshman, my friend and I would go to bars in neighboring small towns because they didn’t card. We ended up getting a roll of toilet paper from each of these places and then keeping them as a “souvenir.” The collection really took off when me and two of my other friends started going on road trips all over and stealing toilet paper from Graceland and MoMA [New York’s Museum of Modern Art]—and labeling where it came from with a black magic marker. We collected thousands of rolls and got other people to collect toilet paper when they went abroad. We also got people to mail us rolls from weird locations. The joke, I guess, was that all the toilet paper looked the same. It was just something fun to do. When the rolls had taken over the front room of our apartment, we opened it up to the public as the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue. I started making T-shirts and brochures and calendars and getting it in guide books. In no way did I think of it as an “art project,” but I guess it sort of was. It was also a way to mess with people.
The Onion is now a professional company with a large revenue and staff. But what was The Onion like when you first started contri
buting in 1996?
The Onion was so much smaller then. All the writers had day jobs. There were staff jobs for those who sold ads or did graphic design or whatever, but there was only one full-time staff position for a writer and another for the head editor. Maybe there was an assistant editor, too. All the writers just worked freelance for nothing—they got paid around forty dollars to come to meetings. The office was a crappy little place with stained carpeting and beanbag chairs. But it was really fun. It was like a club. Everyone was really invested in it. We acted like a group of friends. At that point we were still cementing the voice of the paper.
The first headline The Onion ever ran was in August 1988, and it was “Mendota Monster Mauls Madison.” The piece was about Lake Mendota, which is on campus. Another early piece was headlined: “Thompson Changes Title from ‘Governor’ to ‘Sexecutioner,’” which was about then Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson. You know, references that only locals would care about. Everything was just sillier in the beginning, and more random: “Pen Stolen from Dorm Study Area,” “Everybody’s Eatin’ Bread,” “Angry Lumberjack Demands Hearty Breakfast.”
At one point, before I worked at The Onion, they did a fake issue of the Badger Herald, which was the frattier of the two daily campus newspapers. The Herald was just riddled with errors and had all these bad single-panel cartoons. One was a drawing of a hammer and a clock, and captioned “Hammer Time.” So, you know, at that time, The Onion was still expending energy on something only a small handful of UW students could even understand.
I was a “new” writer. I sort of came in at the right time—just when the writers started to get paid for their work. Right after I started, in 1996, The Onion went on the Internet, which of course was huge for increasing readership, and then we got a book deal. Everything was a big deal—when Mr. Show used a copy of The Onion as a prop in a sketch [“No Slackers,” November 1996], that was the most exciting thing ever. When our first book, Our Dumb Century, went to number one on The New York Times bestsellers list in 1999, it was so thrilling.
For those first six or seven years, The Onion was very much an underground hit.
The Onion had always been sort of an underground secret. It was distributed on the streets in Madison and in a few other cities where they set up a local office to sell local ads—Denver, Milwaukee. But also people could order a subscription and they would be mailed the Madison edition. And those subscriptions became sort of an underground hit. People all over the country would get subscriptions and have them sitting around their apartments or office, and it would be a cool thing that not everyone knew about. Subscribers included comedy writers on the coasts. Older people in comedy still talk about how they know the names of all the dumb pizza and sub sandwich shops in Madison—Rocky Rococo and Big Mike’s Super Subs—because of the ads in the early editions of The Onion.
When The Onion’s popularity started to quickly spread, did you feel that things were going to change for you and the rest of the Onion staff?
It felt like what we were doing was important. Some of this feeling came from us being in the Midwest. We had something to prove. There was a really strong group dynamic. We were like a band. There was no system like there is now. We barely had an office. We didn’t have assistants. Or interns. Or a proofreader. It’s now huge, which is great. But it was smaller then.
A central part of the Onion sensibility, always, was that we were underdogs. All those early Onion stories about pot smokers and dishwashers and nerds and fat guys eating at buffets, or sad housewives buying Swiffer products, tapped into that. We made jokes about political figures and celebrities because we were not them, and then we made jokes about sad sacks because we were them. I don’t think anyone in the writer’s room back then had had a normal, fun childhood.
Do you feel that the paper’s humor changed once it went national?
Things got a bit more clever and less silly. I think “Secondhand Smoke Linked to Secondhand Coolness” is an example of that. The humor started to be more about buzzwords in the media and more about using journalism jargon. I’m also thinking of “Clinton Takes Leave of Office to Stand in Line for Star Wars: Episode I” and “Lewinsky Subpoenaed to Re-Blow Clinton on Senate Floor.” But then I think as it moved into the George W. Bush years, things started to get a little more pointed and satirical: “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over’” and “Bush on North Korea: ‘We Must Invade Iraq.’”
Most of The Onion’s staff, not including the A.V. Club, moved to New York just before 9/11. The Onion was the first comedy outlet—including TV shows, stand-up comedians, anything or anyone—to tackle the horror of that day. Can you talk about what it was like working on that 9/11 issue?
Oh, man. The Onion writing staff had just moved to New York in January of 2001—and then in September, that happened. We were basically just settling in and getting our sea legs. It happened on a Tuesday. All the writers spent the rest of the week freaking out like everyone else. The following Monday, six days after it happened, we went in for a meeting to figure out what we were going to do for the next issue. We decided we’d do a new issue, instead of putting out a reprint issue.
Anything that we could have republished from the years-long catalog of stories just seemed stupid and inconsequential. It almost seemed more offensive to run some old story about Doritos or something. We didn’t initially plan to do an all-9/11 issue, but after working on it, it just turned into that. I mean, why wouldn’t it? It was all any of the writers were thinking about. We were in New York, smelling the smoke and seeing the crushingly sad photocopied “missing” posters. It was actually really great to be working and focused on something instead of just wandering around in a daze or sitting around watching the news.
We normally never cared at all if we offended anyone. If we felt we were making a point we would stand behind, we didn’t care if some people didn’t “get it” or didn’t agree with us. In this case, though, we all really did care what people thought; we didn’t want anyone to think we were being disrespectful or making light of the situation. I just wanted to make things an infinitesimal degree better by giving people a break from all the horror.
In writing that issue, there were a lot of jokes that got thrown out because they were shocking in the wrong way. I think we did a good job of weeding those out. All the staff writers wanted to do the issue except for one. It was contributing writer Joe Garden—and I can understand where he was coming from. He just thought it was wrong and thought it would be the end of The Onion. The only bad thing about working on that issue was having to travel into Manhattan every day—it was scary and depressing, a war zone. But also, it was good to be around friends at a time like that, pitching jokes to each other.
We finished the paper and sent it off to the printers. There was a two-day wait before it hit the streets and the Internet. During that time, I was so nervous, second-guessing if we did the right thing, worried how people would react. Then the issue went online and a trickle of e-mails started coming in, and then a flood. And they were 95 percent positive. On a normal week, 50 percent of the e-mails were people complaining—so this was really good. All these people were writing long, long e-mails to say “thank you” and to say how much the issue meant to them and how they cried while reading it. I was so relieved and so happy and proud.
People have said that this particular Onion issue was special not because it came out so fast but because we actually made jokes about 9/11. Other comedy outlets came back with no jokes at all or unrelated jokes.
We also wanted to avoid any headline like “Thing Everyone Knew Was Going to Happen, Finally Happens.” Or a headline like “We Told You So, America!” Even though The Onion has a long history of chastising the government, we didn’t want to touch on that for this particular issue. Then again, we didn’t want to do a bunch of “Rah Rah U.S.A.!” flag-waving headlines, either.
You wrote a now-famou
s headline for the 9/11 issue that seemed to perfectly sum up the nation’s mood: “Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.” That particular headline was mentioned in newspapers across the world. It was mentioned again and reprinted on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Were you at all surprised by the positive reaction to it?
I’m glad people liked it. Some of the stories in that issue were kind of cocky and opinionated—if your God tells you to kill people, maybe he’s not such a good God. So I’m glad some of the stories were about the sheer sadness and confusion we were feeling. We didn’t feel like we totally understood what was happening.
Over the years, have you been the go-to person for any specific type of Onion story?
I wrote a lot of stories about the sad mundanity of life. Fat guys, blue-collar workers, starving Africans, emotionally needy women. You know, the stories that really don’t have a lot of jokes.
I wrote one [April 1998] with the headline “My Goal Is to Someday Be a Realtor,” which doesn’t even have a joke. It’s just ridiculing this woman for having small dreams instead of just giving up and being totally hopeless.
And yet this Realtor does seem to be content. I was reading through some of your articles again and I saw that a common theme is cheerfulness in the face of adversity.
Or in what would be my idea of hell. Yeah, I guess so. I do like to write about characters who probably should be depressed but who, for whatever reason, find their situation okay, or even a little exciting. I wouldn’t be so cheerful. I guess an example of that would be “It’s Not a Crack House, It’s a Crack Home” [December 3, 1996].
You’ve also written quite a few stories featuring female characters—usually young and naïve—who might not grasp how bad their lives are about to become.