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The Gist
Christine Wenz: The Onion’s Straight Face Made It Funnier
00:28:48
Christine Wenz joins to discuss Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, recalling its Wisconsin roots, AP-style discipline, and newsroom battles over absurd details. She traces the paper’s arc from...
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- [00:00]
A
Hi. I'm doing a debate on Wednesday night at the Comedy Cellar, and the proposal is masculinity is a prison. If you'd like to come and see me win this debate. Sorry, maybe a little less overtly masculine. If you'd like to see me discuss and get to a point of agreement, I'd like for you to do that. That is to come. Normally, it's $25, but I have a promo code for you. I'll put it in the show notes. You just click on. I'm not going to tell you how to do show notes, but when reserve your ticket for 25 bucks, you do the promo code, Mike Pesca, all in caps, which is actually how I legally spell my name, Mike Pesca. And then you could get in for 20 bucks to see me win this debate, to see me come together in a meeting of the minds, and we'll collaborate. Yeah, I'm going to win. Going to wipe the floor with her. Masculinity is a prison. This Wednesday, 6pm Be there. $5 off foreign September 8, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca, and the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has decided that Donald Trump will indeed have to pay E. Jean Carroll. She is entitled to $83 million, 18 in compensatory damages. And the Trump looked at the punitive damages of about 65 million, and they said, yeah, that's fair. So I have no inside information, no one's leaking to me, but I predict that Donald Trump's just going to pay it. Who do I make the check out to? He says with a smile, fare's fair. You got me on this one, Eugene. There is no way he will do it. I do not know how long he could drag his feet. I do not know what mechanisms he will use, but I just cannot see Donald Trump actually paying E. Jean Carroll. I don't know, maybe he'll say, look, this is what I had to get into all the crypto for. You know, I got debts amounting. I just don't think he's going to do it. And unlike some of his other activities that the courts have looked down on, this is not one where he has an electoral advantage. You know, Alligator, Alcatraz. The court shut it. The courts allowed it. Either way, he's like, keep it in the news. Not so with the E. Jean Carroll. Rape, sexual assault. But the judge said, pretty much that's rape and not with that verdict. We'll see how that plays out. Maybe better than torpedoing a boat full of trend Aragua. Although from what the experts say, trend Aragua doesn't really do a lot of maritime drug dealing. Anyway, there's another one where someone might eventually say, hey, that was wrong. And he'll say, oh my God, when you tell me it was wrong. You know what it does? It helps me in the polls. Not so with his rape debt to Aegean Carroll. Rape debt, never a good thing. Even if you're Donald Trump. Even if he could fundraise off of it. On the show today, I inform you about a Cameroonian separatist movement run out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can't make this stuff up, but you know who can? The Onion. The staff of that Madison based satirical rag. And I say that with all due affection, as does Christine Wentz. She was there at the beginning and she is here now to talk about her new book, Funny Because It's True how the Onion Created Modern American News Satire. The Onion is one of, if not the most important satirical institutions in America. What does it mean to be an important satirical institution? Not a lot, according to the fortunes of the Onion, but man, did it launch not just many, many careers, but more than laughs. Thoughts. And isn't that what satire is supposed to do? There is a new book out about the history of the Onion and it is called Funny Because It's True how the Onion Created Modern American News Satire. Christine Wentz was there for almost all of it and she joins me now. Hello, Christine, how are you?
- [04:20]
B
I'm good. How are you today?
- [04:22]
A
So good. So what was your first foray into the Onion or what became the Onion? You personally?
- [04:27]
B
For me personally, I was only there for a first couple of years, but my roommate Tim Keck and his business partner Chris Johnson founded the onion back in 1988. And, and when it first started, it was basically Tim, who grew up in a newspaper family, a Chicago area newspaper family was he ran out of money from his gas station job and he needed to, he needed to do something to pay his rent. And so he knew how to knew about newspapers from his family and he started a newspaper. And what the newspaper was like, the editorial side of it, that kind of came a little bit later and that but that then my friend Matt Cook, who was an improv comedian in Madison, sort of came up with the idea that it would be all made up. And after that it just kind of went from there. So Tim and Chris basically created this forum where all their sort of weirdo creative friends could basically write whatever wanted and they sold a lot of Ads, and it came out every week, and it was really popular, and it really took off.
- [05:22]
A
So when you said he came from a newspaper family, this was fascinating to me. Or Chicago area, maybe broadly defined, because it was Oshkosh, was it not? And in fact, it wasn't just. Well, there are headlines from this local oshkosh paper. The Oshkosh or the Northwestern News or the Oshkosh Northwest.
- [05:42]
B
The Oshkosh Northwestern. That came a little bit later, but yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [05:45]
A
And it was. It's fascinating because while the Onion is a lot of different things, everyone is very familiar with their area man. And their underplayed headlines of really normal things. This wasn't slightly inspired by different newspapers. This was ripped from the Oshkosh Northwestern, was it not?
- [06:08]
B
Well, it's funny because, I mean, all of us, I grew up in rural Wisconsin. Tim lived in rural Wisconsin after his family left Hammond, Indiana, where his dad was the. The. An editor at the Hammond Times, and his mom was a pretty, like, pioneering environmental reporter there. But all of us grew up with these sort of regional or local kind of Midwestern newspapers that had these. This, you know, they would be a mix of, like, wire stories, but then there would be like, this column by some weird guy who owned a bar. And, you know, and like, had stuff like that all mixed together. You know, area man has cassette player stolen. You know, sort of stuff would be like a headline in the newspapers. And so we were all, you know, being where we were from, we were all very familiar with that kind of. Of thing.
- [06:48]
A
Yeah. You have a montage of Oshkosh Northwestern newspaper headlines, literally, cassette player stolen Truck strikes car Balloon crosses America. Area man named vice president. I assume that wasn't Spiro Agnew. Fashion show set up for Tuesday. Masons to celebrate Zoo to salute Senior adults. Outrage mounts around the world. So the analogy. I was thinking of another great satirical or humorous piece of the culture. Airplane. An airplane is a parody of disaster movies. But it is also, if you know this one disaster movie, Zero Hour. The inventors of airplane Wisconsin guys, Zucker, Abrams and Zucker bought it. Literally bought it. And if you watch Zero Hour and watch Airplane, you could match these shot for shot at times. And I came away with the same feeling about these headlines in the Kosh News or the Northwestern. Sorry.
- [07:48]
B
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that's. Yeah, that. You said it. Yeah.
- [07:53]
A
And so when did. So it was funny, but it was funny in a way that it's a little different than how it's funny now. Now it is very structured, but then in the early going, there could be a headline from a cover story about a gorilla speaking to people, for instance. There was absurdity. There weren't as many rules in the beginning. Right.
- [08:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. So there's a period of time, this is mostly after I was gone from about 1990 to about 93, when the Onion was the editor who was running everything and making everything happen was a guy named Rich Dom, who later went on to be an executive producer and head writer at the Colbert Report. But at that time, he, he kind of helped the Onion and his, his. He and his. The people that he hired have this very sort of silly, absurdist, kind of fringe comedy point of view. You know, it was very influenced by David Letterman and know that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, there was several years there of extreme silliness on the front page. And then in around 94, 95, it was already moving in this direction anyway. But they decided Editor in chief Scott Dickers and other folks decided to make it kind of redo the paper into the very straight news parody, like AP style news parody that we see today or like we are, you know, and then it's come back recently in the new print edition.
- [09:15]
A
Yeah. And it wasn't limiting. I mean, I find this is true for comedy, but once you have the structure in a spine that everything really has to adhere to AP style, it frees up the comedy. It allows pitching of headlines that are funnier, it allows for the jokes to be funnier, and it allows for the jokes not just to be funnier, but somehow to play as more resonant. And I think Stephen Thompson, who's a whole. An old colleague of mine, explained that. Well, in the book.
- [09:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they. The editor at that time was Robert Siegel, and I think he was really instrumental in kind of enforcing this, this very strict AP style. And so when you do that, you have this, this very strict framework into which to put the jokes. Like. Yeah, you can kind of put almost anything into that format and it becomes funny. I mean, there's plenty of Onion jokes. If you told them in a different way, they wouldn't be nearly as, as, as pointed and, you know, just make you laugh as much as they do when that, when you have that contrast between the very straight solemn and then the extreme silliness that the Onion is putting into it. Yeah, right.
- [10:17]
A
Robert Siegel, not the NPR guy, the director guy who did big fan and who did the wrestler and he.
- [10:23]
B
Yeah, exactly. But, but Stephen Thompson was his copy editor, though, and Copy editors are very important. When it. Eventually. And so Stephen would go in and he put it. He made everything 5% funnier by like making everything adhere exactly to. To. To the way it. To the. To what AP style needed to be. So. And I think that's totally true.
- [10:44]
A
So one of his insights that I never really thought about is if you're doing a parody or a satire, you can tell any kind of story you want, but if you're doing it within strict AP style, it can't be the entire story of the thing. The AP will run stories about a piece of legislation passing, but it passes incrementally. So one story could be about the introduction of the legislation, another story could be about pushback, and a third story could be about passage. And in forcing the fake story writers of the Onion to stick to only one and not tell the whole story, it did get better, didn't it? This is what Thompson was pointing out.
- [11:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then always, I think with any, Any art form, when you put. Put a structure, a boundary around it, it can actually create the. You have the option for more creativity in a lot of ways then because you can kind of go. You can go deeper instead of broader. And I think that that really helps.
- [11:41]
A
So tell me about how they make an exception to these rules. There was a debate, a hilariously pointed and acrimonious debate over Alpha Centauri versus something called Saint Bernard Star.
- [11:57]
B
Yeah, so. So this was an incident that had a head writer at the time, Todd Hansen, told me about. And, and he described the people took all put their work at the Onion very seriously, which is what. Part of the reason I wanted to write a sort of a serious book about the. Because it became very evident that everyone who works there took their work very seriously. But he. They would have these huge fights over the facts and the details in the, in the. In some of the stories. So he wanted to do a story so we get the headline right. It was like, you know, like aliens happy when that last episode of Cheers reaches Alpha Centauri or something like that. And the problem, but it within with the article, it was like, you know, four light years later. But it had actually been like a different number of years since Cheers ended. So the broadcast of. Of Cheers would not, in fact, have reached Alpha Centauri by that time. It would have reached a different star. And so this is the level of detail that they would get into. And they had this huge fight with the editor, Robert Siegel, over which star to use, because as Todd put it, the only people that are going to get this joke will know that we picked the wrong star. And so they. But Siegel made them stick with Alpha Centauri because that's the one everybody knows. Was. So.
- [13:09]
A
Yeah, because it seems like a star, not Saint Bernard star. If you.
- [13:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was. You know, it was another day. They were like, oh. They're like, that's not a star. That's a stupid name for a star. No one's gonna know what that is, and the whole joke will be fruit. So in that case, they did choose comedy over fact. So.
- [13:24]
A
Yeah, because that also via. There's an inviolable rule of comedy that if you inject something that causes the audience to say, wait, what are they talking about? Like, a specific detail that doesn't scan, if you bump them, you can't laugh at the joke. I mean.
- [13:42]
B
Right. Right.
- [13:43]
A
Yeah, yeah. Jackie Gleason used to call it the old granddad rule, where if a guy goes into a bar and orders a whiskey, if you make him order an old granddad, which type of whiskey, the audience say, wait, why an old granddad? What's an old granddad? What does that mean? And they can't laugh at the joke. So in that case, St. Bernard star is the old granddad.
- [14:00]
B
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [14:02]
A
Yes. Okay, so you mentioned that you were there and it was founded and it was almost immediately sold. Why. Why were the early. And then we'll get to the later fortunes. But why was it put up for sale when it was doing pretty okay early on?
- [14:17]
B
Well, I mean, it was. Tim and Chris sold it after the first year because they were completely exhausted. You know, they didn't have any money. They're, like, living on pizza, traded for ad coupons, you know, and. And they were just totally fried. They had both, like, left school. They wanted to try to finish their degrees. I think both of them actually ended up not finishing, but they were just wiped out and wanted to go do something else. And in fact, they both, a couple of years later, would go on to start real alt weeklies. Tim Keck in Seattle with the Stranger and Chris Johnson in Albuquerque with a paper called New City, I think. And so after that, they sold the paper to three people who were already working there. I say working in, you know, air quotes, because most people weren't paid anything. Scott Dickers, who was a cartoonist, he was actually being paid for his cartoons. Pete Heisey, who is the. Who's the ad manager and was working on commission, probably. And then another person, Johanna Wilder, who was the computer person.
- [15:17]
A
So Tim Keck sells the Onion, and you could say, oh, my God, what a terrible decision. Except for two things. He goes on to found the Stranger, which I know all weeklies aren't doing well now, but he's a very astute businessman and he, he has made a lot of money over the years with the Stranger, and I think he's still doing really well with the Stranger. What I understand. So that's point one, that the thing that he pivoted to wound up being successful. But the other thing is, even though the Onion has this place in our conscious it consciousness, it took a long time to get success, and then the success was pretty modest compared to its cultural footprint, right?
- [15:57]
B
Well, I mean, it depends on how you define success, I guess. I mean, there was a good period when they went online in 96. That was what really made them explode, because suddenly they, you know, they'd been working on their style, and this is after the AP switch happened and everything. So they kind of appeared on the early Internet fully formed and were immediately, you know, just annihilated any competition and were, you know, instantly being profiled in national media and stuff like that. And I think at that time, the Onion, I mean, you know, people were certainly not making money. The writers were not making money at the Onion. But, you know, when you go from being a dishwasher to being, you know, being paid a little more than that to be a full time satire writer, like, that's a, That's a big step up. And the other thing was that because of the way the Onion was run at that time, there was a big divide between business and editorial. Very, very consciously created wall between the two. And so that meant basically all the business I did was pay the writer salaries, keep the lights on, and then you guys do whatever you want, you know. And so they had this incredible creativity and total freedom really to do really whatever they wanted. And that's. That was absolutely key for the, for the Onion's development.
- [17:02]
A
But if you compare it to institutions like Saturday Night Live or the Daily show or even the National Lampoon or maybe even Harvard plus National Lampoon, it didn't seem to. For a number of reasons. It didn't seem to make anyone a mega millionaire. I mean, what's the most that any one investor made from the Onion, would you say?
- [17:24]
B
Well, I mean, when David Schaefer, who later invested in the Onion and then sold to Univision, this was a little farther down the road. He made plenty of money. I mean, he made, you know, I mean, compared to Elon Musk, it's not the same. But he probably, I'm just, I'm just making this up right now, but he made at least, probably 5, 10, $15 million in that sale, I'm guessing. And you know, before that, I mean, Pete Heisey, when he sold his shares to David Schaefer early on after this is when David Schaefer bought it at his, as his investment, I think he made like 1.7 million or something like that. And Scott Deckers may have made something a little bit less than that when he sold his. But like, yeah, the people who created it, they, you know, they, the business people got something, but they didn't, you know, they didn't get enough to like quit working forever. I mean, I don't know if somebody gave me $1.7 million, I could work, quit working forever. But yeah, and the writers kind of were sort of screwed over, you know, the entire, I mean, that's always the classic story, right? The people who create it got very, very little of, of the money that was made from, from it, like kind of at any time, I think.
- [18:32]
A
And is it the case that to get a story in the Onion, it's all the headline pitch? No one even thinks about anything other than the headline.
- [18:38]
B
I mean, I mean, there's been, you know, 10 billion headlines pitched at the Onion over the years. So I don't know if there's, that those things have never happened. But my understanding is that is that, yeah, it's headline based and typically it's, you know, 100 headlines might get pitched for every two or three that are actually accepted. And, and there's a, as I understand it, the, the headlines are supposed to be delivered in the meeting in a very, very straight way. You can't be like, okay, wait, I got a really great one. You know, you got it. You got to just like deliver it very directly, like you're reading the encyclopedia or something. So. But yeah, but that's, that's how it works.
- [19:11]
A
As I understand it, the Onion was recently bought by a group that includes MSNBC's former disinformation reporter. That seems kind of funny, but also kind of not. Where do you, where would you say its fortunes rest today?
- [19:27]
B
Well, I think that they, they seem like they're doing well. I mean, I went, I've done a couple of events with Ben Collins. I went down and talked to the, the Onion staff not that long ago about the book, and they bought 30 copies and handed them all out. And I, I, I would like to think that, that, you know, The. The current staff has. Has learned some stuff from reading about the past history. As far as their fortunes. I mean, I think that their. They seem to be doing well. I mean, they were one of the first entities to get a million followers on Blue sky, if that means anything anymore. They've. They have more than, you know, 50,000. They have 54,000 print subscribers at this point, which has been nice. They. They. They've been getting. I mean, I mean, I'm biased because I'm like, you know, I'm thinking about the Onion still all the time. And so when an article about that with Ben College it comes up and like, oh, see, look, there's a thing about the Onion again. So I feel like they're having a little bit of a renaissance here, which would be nice now that they have, you know, again, they've kind of gone back to the way they were early on when the Onion was so creative in the late 90s. They're independent. They're not part of, you know, some hedge fund portfolio anymore, like, the way they were for a little while. And they have owners that really just want to, again, pay the salaries, keep the lights on, you guys, do whatever you want. And it. And it hasn't been like that in the past. They went through a good 10 or 15 years when. And, you know, they push back against it, but. But the line between editorial and business got eroded a fair amount. And I think that. I hope that it. That it's back again. So. So we'll see.
- [21:00]
A
For my own taste, I do think that the Onion got a little preachy there for a while. But first of all, you point out that there was always an undercurrent of politics. At one point, you quote someone saying, look, I think we're more or less Marxist or agree with the Marxist critique, but we're not Marxist, all in caps, maybe with a hammer and sickle down your throat. So my question is, I don't know, do you think that is just a me thing as opposed to an Onion thing, where there are people saying, oh, this is a preachy period of the Onion. This is a less preachy period. Is it mostly subjective? Is there anything to that?
- [21:39]
B
I mean, I, you know, I mean, everyone thinks that Onion is best from the era that they were from, you know, and I think that Onion had a. Had an edge in the 90s that it maybe got, you know, sanded down a little bit later on. I remember the. The current editor saying to me at one point that, you know, people are complaining that the Onion is woke now or whatever, he sort of laughed at that idea. I think what's in the Onion is reflective of the people who, who are working for it. And though there's some, some of the old crew has come back a little bit, I don't know, I mean for me personally, like, I don't, I don't necessarily like heavy handed politics, you know, with my art and I think of the, the Onion as a, as an art form. But at the same time, you know, they, they were, I don't know, they had to, they went through all the same changes that all the, that real media, real news did, you know, and I talk about that a lot in the book and I think a lot of the forces that, that, I think actually that kind of come from social media and that environment, you know, push. It sort of pushes public discourse in certain directions and you know, does that make some of it kind of preachy, like. Yeah, sometimes that happens. Yeah, I think, I think that that's, that's, you know. Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't fight too hard against that. However, now that I've been getting the new print edition again, I mean I'm, there's a little bit of bite back that, that I think was gone for a while and I'm like, oh good. This is, this is what I said. You know, satirist isn't really, you know, satirist is supposed to, you know, they're trying to fight for, for truth and they're trying to fight for the stuff that people, they're pointing out things that other people are missing and that kind of thing. That's when it's at its best. And the print format in for whatever reason, it kind of allows that depth to happen in a way that the more sort of surface level, you know, kind of digital, you know, social media based version doesn't.
- [23:28]
A
The name of the book is funny because it's true, by the way, it's not true. How the Onion created modern American news satire. Christine Wentz, thank you so much.
- [23:38]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [23:49]
A
And now the spiel. I bring you an update on the Amazonian independence movement. Amazonia, of course is the self declared independent state of the English speaking parts of Cameroon. For eight years now, Amazonian rebels have inflicted death and destruction on various parts of the rest of the country and have increasingly been steered by leaders of their government in exile. Which brings me to today's federal indictment. Benedict Nakua and Pascal Pascal Kishi Wang. We both live in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota and they are charged with directing fighters in the Republic of Cameroon to bomb, kidnap and kill civilians and government officials in the name of establishing once and for all an Amazonia. And by the way, I will get to the name Amazonia in a second. Some of their alleged crimes include kidnapping a 79 year old senator from Cameroon's northwest region and refusing to release her her even when ransom was paid. Planting IEDs along the course of the race for hope in Cameroon, which injured 19 and set back hope in general. And what do Amazonians want? And when do they want it? When do they want it? Is now. The answer is always now to that question. But what they want is their own country. Their complain go back many years, in fact, to when the Germans controlled Cameroon. Did you know Cameroon was spelled with a K back then? At least in German it was. And to the Ambassador protectorate of the 19th century. Then when Cameroon became independent in 1961, the Amazonians felt they were subsumed and overwhelmed by the French or their French speaking counterparts. And more recently, a flashpoint ensued when French administrators were appointed to schools staffed with staff and students who are mostly English speaking. It is therefore just a short leap to a fundraising effort for AK47s and IEDs centered in Minneapolis. To quote the federal indictment, fighters use the funds to purchase guns, often referred to as sticks, ammunition referred to as ground nuts or seeds, and IEDs referred to as popcorn. The name Amazonia, by the way, was taken from Ambus Bay. And this, now the promised etymology was coined by Fon Gorgi Dinka as part of the campaign for restoration of autonomy. It's unclear if Fond Dinko was nearly as violent as these two Minnesotans, but as the fawn, he was a respected leader, a fan, of course, being the title for a type of king in this region of the world. There were some famous Fonz. I think I got this list from Wikipedia. I'll read you the fonts. There was Fon Abe Abe, the Faun of Upper Zetset. There was Fawn Assange, the Faun of a Song, the Faun of a Song, the Faun of a Wing. There was the Fan of Bali Gonson, the Faun of Bali Goshu, the Fan of Bali Guam, the Fan of Bangua, the Fang of Bessie, and the Fan of Bum. The powers of these Fonz were to hold meetings in bathrooms and induce the playing of a jukebox with the nudge of an elbow. Sorry. I'm sorry. That is not the Fonz. That was the Fonz. Arthur Fonzarelli. As to Pascal, Pascal Kishiwang, we By the way, the indictment just calls him Pascal once, but the New York Times had him as Pascal Pascal. So I'm going with them. And Benedict Nakua, unlike the Fonz, they are not cool. They are charged with eight counts of planting bombs, kidnapping and killing in their home, their fake country of Amazonia. One final point. Amor is curious about the digs of foreign leaders who run separatist movements out of the United States. Sometimes they live in big compounds. This was the case with Fethullah Gulen, who until his death last year, the Turkish Muslim anti Erdogan leader. He was holed up quite nicely in Pennsylvania, but it's not always the case. Emmanuel Constant, known as Toto, who led a Haitian death squad. He lived in Queens. He sold real estate. He was actually busted, not for the death squad because of the real estate. I can report that these two gentlemen lived in very nice houses, although in a McMansion sort of way. I can further report with 99 point something confidence that the daughter of Pascal Pasc Kishiwangwi is quite an accomplished singer, having won competitions of the Broadway songbook and once even sang the national anthem at a Minnesota Vikings game. The Vikings open their season tonight. Wangwi and Nakua face life imprisonment if convicted of the charges, at which point all of Amazonia will weep. And that's it for today's show. Cory Warr is the producer of the Gist and Ashley Kahns, our production coordinator Kathleen Sykes helps me with the GIST list very much helps me. Philip Swissgood consults on all matter Substack where I am@mikepesca.substack.com and Michelle Pesca oversees it all in Peru. G. Peru. Do Peru and thanks for listening.