And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  Authors tend to joke that they ended up in a writing career because they didn't have any other marketable skills, but for Todd Hanson, longtime head writer and story editor for The Onion, this was literally true. Aside from writing comedy, Hanson's only other meaningful employment was minimum-wage menial labor — dishwasher, floor mopper, cashier. And, by his own admission, he wasn't very good at any of it.

  Since 1990, Hanson and the other staff writers at The Onion — billed as “America's Finest News Source” — have been responsible for some of the most brilliant and influential comedy of the last two decades. While it's often mistaken for mere newspaper parody, The Onion — like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — is not simply mimicking the sloppy reporting and questionable ethics of tabloid (and, yes, mainstream) journalism. The headlines alone are mini — satirical essays and stories, ruthlessly critiquing everything from religion (“Church Group Offers Homosexual New Life in Closet”) to economics (“Neither Person in Conversation Knows What Hedge Fund Is”) to education (“Nation's Educators Alarmed By Poorly Written Teen Suicide Notes”) to orgies (“Orgy a Logistical Nightmare”).

  Like the best comedy institutions, The Onion has always been nonpartisan, bashing both the right (“Republicans Call For Privatization Of Next Election”) and the left (“Adorable Democratic Candidate Actually Believes He Has a Chance”). And, above all, they've remained consistently controversial. A headline such as “Los Angeles to Siphon Water from Minorities' Bodies” may have raised some eyebrows, but Hanson and company are unrepentant and unapologetic, determined to stay true to their satirical roots, whomever they might offend.

  When Hanson first enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1986, he didn't foresee a future in humor writing. Madison was, after all, by no means an epicenter of entertainment or comedy. And Hanson was not exactly the university's most ambitious academic. He personified the “slacker” image, so popular at the time with the media. He may have kept his dorm mates laughing with his caustic zingers, but the deans and professors did not find his act (and lack of schoolwork) as amusing. After dropping most of his classes, Hanson stuck around campus anyway, drawing cartoons for the college newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, and hanging out with people who shared his sardonic and disaffected sensibilities.

  When two of his Daily Cardinal colleagues, Scott Dikkers and Peter Haise, decided to take over a newspaper parody called The Onion in 1989, originally created to promote a local pizza establishment, Hanson signed on as head writer. The rest of the writing staff consisted of friends from their small social circle, which Hanson once described as “a disparate group of odd and often misguided underachievers.”

  In the beginning, putting out The Onion was merely a way to pass the time. They never expected anybody outside of Madison to read it, but it didn't take long for word to spread, first to Milwaukee, then to Denver, Boulder, Chicago, and, ultimately, with the launch of their Web site in 1996. Their breakout moment occurred on April Fools' Day 1999, with the release of the best-seller Our Dumb Century. The bare-bones satirical rag thrown together less than a decade before by a small group of friends in a basement and published with little or no budget had transformed, seemingly overnight, into a worldwide comedy juggernaut.

  Now in the national spotlight, The Onion soon eclipsed The Harvard Lampoon as the country's number-one resource for comedy-writing talent. Many of The Onion's pivotal contributors were lured away to write for television for fat paychecks. Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum ended up writing and producing for The Daily Show; Richard Dahm helped create The Colbert Report; and Tim Harrod joined the writing staff of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Hanson, on the other hand, remained, stubbornly loyal to The Onion.

  Hanson and the Onion team moved from Madison to New York City in early 2001, where they soon grappled with Hollywood over movie deals, published a series of Ad Nauseam book collections, and launched The Onion News Network (featuring on-line videos), as well as The Onion Radio News, which currently airs daily on more than sixty stations nationwide. But despite its fame, The Onion hasn't evolved into a publishing behemoth. The newspaper's headquarters is now located in a posh Manhattan office building and its staff numbers in the hundreds, but the creative core is still (more or less) the same dozen or so snarky outsiders who have been with the paper since the early nineties, putting out a weekly product for the sheer love of it.

  You've been a writer for The Onion for more than twenty years. Do you feel at all constrained by the paper's format?

  Yeah, of course, I do — sure. You can't do the same thing for that long without feeling somewhat constrained. But not really by The Onion's format. When people say, “Why do you want to keep working at The Onion when you could have left and gone to do this or that?,” I always answer, “Well, because you can't make child-molestation jokes about the Pope anywhere other than The Onion.”

  So there's no interest in branching out and moving beyond writing for print?

  Listen, if I had wanted to make a quarter-million dollars a year writing for a sitcom, I could have done it. I could have gotten one of those staff jobs. But I didn't do it. I just didn't. Maybe I'm the dumbest guy in the world. But it seemed like, “Why would I leave The Onion when it's clearly a once-in-a-lifetime thing?” Actually, scratch that. It's not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It's a never-in-almost-anybody's- lifetime thing.

  How many people can say that something like that happened to them? That they and their friends have this little group in which they did this little fun thing together and then it ended up becoming internationally respected? Most people go through their entire lives without ever having anything like this happen. They get married, they have kids, they grow old, and die. And nothing like this ever happens to them. But it happened to me. That's amazing. What are the chances it's going to happen twice? I'm going to go out on a limb and say, “Probably zero.”

  But don't get me wrong. I still complain every day.

  Why — are you not happy with your lot in life?

  [Laughs] Am I happy? I am absolutely miserable!

  Are you clinically depressed?

  Yes, and I've been my depressed my whole life. My entire adult life, anyway.

  Do you think this unhappiness expresses itself in your writing?

  I think so, sure. If I hadn't found dark humor as an outlet, I don't know what the hell I would have done. I'm known for writing really, really black humor at The Onion.

  Can you give me any specific examples?

  I wrote an article that was called “Local Man Might as Well Just Give Up.” I don't think I came up with the headline, but I wrote the piece. Another piece was called “Doctors Find New Way to Prolong Meaningless Existence.”

  Let's see, there are so many: “U.S. Populace Lurches Methodically Through the Motions for Yet Another Day,” “Study: Depression Hits Losers Hardest,” “Utter Failure to Spend Rest of Day in Bed.” I was actually in the photo in that last article. I was the loser in the bed.

  You once said that The Onion's humor is about one thing: life's nightmare hellscape of unrelenting horror. I suppose those articles are a good example.

  Well, like many of the jokes I make, that was said to get a laugh, but it was also true. That line was actually used in the “Utter Failure” article. That was an honest joke. That's kind of my rule about jokes. I don't think there is any point in making a joke that is not an honest joke. And I don't find jokes funny if they're not honest. Unfortunately, the truth usually hurts.

  How did you become involved with The Onion?

  I first met Rich Dahm, who later became a writer for The Onion, in a dorm at my freshman orientation at the University of Wisconsin. This was in 1986. We had this icebreaker exercise in which you had to state your name, your major, and what kind of car you'd be if you were a car. It was some idiot's idea of an icebreaker, you know. And, of course, I'm sitting in the group area of the dorm, just feeling like a moron. All the guys tried to sound cool by naming expensive sports c
ars, and all the girls tried to be sexy by saying things like, “I would be a little red Corvette.” And then it was my turn, and I said I couldn't decide between the modified Jaguar hearse from the movie Harold and Maude or the magic bus from the song by The Who. People laughed.

  Then it was Rich's turn. He said he would be the Wagon Queen Family Truck-ster, which was the fictional car from National Lampoon's Vacation.

  How many of the other freshmen understood that reference?

  A lot didn't. It was a strange thing. I felt a connection right away. We became friends. We'd sit up all night in the dorm making each other laugh, just being silly.

  Scott Dikkers, the longtime editor of The Onion, was going to the University of Wisconsin at this time. Did you know him?

  Scott is not a social person, but I met him because he had a brilliant comic strip called “Jim's Journal” in The Daily Cardinal, which was the university's newspaper. I thought it was absolutely hilarious, totally deconstructed. It received some criticism, because it wasn't a stereotypical cartoon with a gag at the end. It was anti-humor. That's the shorthand word that we used to throw around all the time on The Onion staff: anti-humor.

  I was also doing a cartoon for The Daily Cardinal called “Badgers and Other Animals.” It was kind of a cross between “Doonesbury” and Lynda Barry's “Ernie Pook's Comeek,” and it was basically about me dropping out of school and doing nothing. I did this for four years, from 1988 to 1992.

  How were you supporting yourself at this time? Just through your cartoons?

  Hell, no. I only made $4 a strip! I was doing odd jobs, like washing dishes or working at an answering service, where I would answer phones for doctors and take messages. Or working at a convenience store. I worked at a comic-book store for a little while. That was the best job I had, because I could draw signs for the store with cartoon characters on them. On the other hand, I did manage to get myself fired within a year or so.

  It wasn't like I just dropped out of school and that was that. It was gradual. I would take a class now and then, but eventually I did drop out completely. Basically, I was just hanging out at The Daily Cardinal. And that's where I met all these people who later became associated with The Onion.

  Who originally started The Onion before Scott Dikkers and Peter Haise took over?

  Two guys — Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson — in 1988. They were advertising majors at the University of Wisconsin. They created the paper just to sell pizza coupons. And rather than produce an actual newspaper, Tim and Christopher figured they'd just get some friends to make up stories. The papers were distributed in record stores and delis and other places like that.

  About a year after it began, Scott Dikkers and Peter Haise bought the newspaper from Tim and Christopher for around $16,000.

  The Onion was a very different paper in the early 1990s than it is today.

  Right. At first, it was a parody of a Weekly World News — type tabloid. A lot of the early stories were so great and silly, like “Dead Guy Found,” which was written by my old roommate, Matt Cook. Or a huge front-page banner headline that read “Pens Stolen,” with the subhead “From Dorm Study Area.” We still do those kinds of satires; a recent article has the headline “Rubber Band Needed.”

  But even then the paper sort of exhibited an anti-establishment attitude. Tommy Thompson, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, used to be the governor of Wisconsin. And the paper ran a headline like “Governor Declares November Masturbation Month.” Thompson complained and demanded the paper run a retraction, which we did. The retraction read something like “We previously reported that the governor had said that November was Masturbation Month. This was untrue. In reality, November was Sodomy Month. The Onion regrets the error.” I believe that is the only actual retraction The Onion has printed.

  Was there ever any thought on your part that it would one day become what it's become?

  Are you kidding? Everyone on the staff felt that it was just something to do where we would feel less like we were wasting our lives. Nobody ever had a goal of getting paid, let alone thinking we were going to become media figures or have our work read all over the world. It was just something you did two nights a week when your shift ended. We got together and worked on this little free paper in Madison, Wisconsin.

  I think Onion writers are a completely differently breed. They're just a bunch of weirdos. Mostly shy, mostly geeky. That's them in a nutshell, but I don't know if that's really an adequate description. We never thought we were going to have careers, period — let alone this. And here we are, twenty years later.

  The Onion now has a huge readership for a humor publication.

  It's not as big as you might imagine. I think our current audience is about five million readers, which is a lot, but that's not enough to keep a network-TV show on the air. That's not even close to enough to keep a network-TV show on the air. If you only had five million viewers, you'd be canceled immediately. The Onion is not really part of the showbiz mainstream. You may think it is, but it isn't. But I don't care if we are outside of the mainstream — I prefer it that way. And I think that's why the people who like it really like it. That's what makes it unique.

  Besides, how many millions of fans do you really need? If I were a stand-up comedian and I went on the stage and there were a thousand people in the audience, I would be like, “Holy shit! That's a lot of people!” And yet, there are about five million people out there who read The Onion every week. That's ridiculous. That is beyond the wildest dream that I ever would have had.

  How many years did you work for The Onion without being paid?

  The first seven years.

  Seven years?

  When I say not getting paid, I mean I was paid maybe $10 a meeting. There were two meetings a week. So that was $20. And then, at one point, there was this big leap forward when writers made $15 a meeting. So I then made $30 a week.

  So from 1990 until 1997, you were working for about $120 a month writing humor? That would come out to, what, about $1,500 a year?

  [Laughs] Well, you're not taking into account all that big-time dishwashing money I was earning. Getting paid to write for The Onion was never a goal. It was just something to do for fun, like being a part of an intramural volleyball team. Not that I would ever be on an intramural volleyball team for fun, but you know what I mean. Everything that we've achieved is gravy. I had no idea how long I was going to be washing dishes for a living. Five years? Twenty years? I would have a panic attack when I thought about it. In fact, when I think about it now, I have a panic attack.

  One thing that really annoys me is when I'm on a panel or giving a talk and I have to take questions from the audience. People will often ask, “How do I get a job writing comedy?” And I just … it just annoys the fuck out of me. I always answer: “You do it for free for ten years and then, if you are really lucky, you get to write humor as a full-time job.” And then they look at me like, “That's not what I want to do.”

  How is it different now with the younger writers who work at The Onion? How does their sensibility differ from yours when you were starting out?

  I think some of the younger writers have the same sensibility that I had in the early years, but I also think some of them are actually more of the type A, ambitious variety. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It's probably a much better way to be. But it is interesting. The people we hire now are twenty-two, and you get the feeling that they are kind of like, “Oh, this is awesome. I got a great job.” As opposed to, “Hey, I have to go wash dishes in a couple of hours. I better think of something fun to do in the meantime.”

  Also, they grew up reading The Onion.

  That's just the strangest thing to me. When people say, “I've been reading The Onion since I was ten,” I don't even know how to respond to that. It's very strange.

  Any advice for those readers who dream of writing for The Onion?

  Start your own paper. Do your own thing. That's what I would re
commend to anybody who wants to do anything, not just write for The Onion. Do it for free and have fun. Whether it's writing comedy or making music or painting or performing interpretive dance. If you want to do something creative, you should have a better reason for wanting to do it than to make money. If you want to make money, my advice is to sell shoes or go into banking.

  Let's talk about your influences. You've spoken in past interviews about your admiration for Late Night with David Letterman. What was it about the sensibility of that show that appealed to you so much?

  When I was 8-years-old, going on nine — this was in 1977 — Star Wars was the big paradigm shift for me and my generation. It blew everybody away. You didn't have to be a sci-finerd to appreciate it. It was just the coolest thing that anybody had ever seen, by far. But then all of that changed at some point, and I forgot about Star Wars. There was this new generational paradigm shift, and that was Late Night with David Letterman.

  That show changed everybody's attitude — at least people my age. Everyone just started trying to imitate Letterman's attitude, that sarcastic persona. It was powerful — this ironic voice really became the touchstone for my generation, what people would call “slackers” or “Gen X.”

  What do you mean by “powerful”?

  I just mean it gave us a certain power to … it wasn't like I was this little nerd who got picked on or anything. I was the little nerd who could talk himself out of being picked on. I would crack wise, and the tough kids were too dumb to get it. I had this ironic distance that enabled me to kind of set myself above all of the bullshit and yet still participate. It became this thing where I could simultaneously mock everything and appreciate it at the same time.

  Later, when I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, we all loved Late Night. There was a certain shared sensibility. Everybody used that ironic voice all the time. And that was the voice of The Onion. It was just the way we always joked with each other. I still find Letterman amazing — his timing, his whole persona. He's just a machine. He's like this honed, brilliant genius. Merrill Markoe, the show's first head writer, deserves a lot of credit for that voice, though she rarely receives it. She's amazing — one of the only people who can do the Letterman voice just as good as he can. I love her.