"Funny Because It's True" - New book reveals the beginnings of The Onion | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: If you haven’t heard of The Onion, a satirical news publication, you’ve no doubt come across the many memes and parodies inspired by its style. The Onion began with a group of scrappy Gen-Xer's who wanted to poke fun at mainstream news. It’s evolved into an at times biting, oftentimes comic, cultural critic. What role does humor play in making the world make sense? Author Christine Wenc, a member of The Onion’s original staff, joins Dana Taylor on the Excerpt to discuss her new book “Funny Because It’s True,” which is on bookshelves now.
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Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, April 20th, 2025. If you haven't heard of The Onion, a satirical news publication, you've no doubt come across the many memes and parodies inspired by its style. The Onion began with a group of scrappy Gen Xers who wanted to poke fun at mainstream news. It's evolved into an at times biting, oftentimes comic cultural critic. What role does humor play in making the world make sense? I'm joined now by Christine Wence, a member of the Onion's original staff and author of the new book. Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, which is available now. Thanks for joining me, Christine.
Christine Wence:
Thanks for having me, Dana. This is great.
Dana Taylor:
In your book, you talk about good fake news versus bad fake news. How does the Onion walk the line between satire and misinformation?
Christine Wence:
That is a good question. The Onion's mission is to try to make the world a better place with its satire. And the point of satire is to kind of point out what the writers think is wrong and needs to be changed, and there's a lot of thought that the Onion writers put into what they decide to target as their satire, so I think that's definitely part of it.
Dana Taylor:
Satire is, of course, a powerful tool to hold those in positions of authority accountable. One of the Onion's, most famous headlines is one that's often seen after a mass shooting in America, and it says, "No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens." Do you think the Onion has successfully influenced public opinion with its brand of satire?
Christine Wence:
I would like to think that it has. I mean, the popularity of the Onion, what I would hope is some evidence of that. I mean, it was amazing to me that after nearly 40 years, the Onion is still popular. Were the first entity, I think, to reach a million followers on Blue Sky, and that headline in particular I think has made a big impact. It's been reported in the media multiple times. Even in the course of me writing the book, I had to update the number of times that it's been reprinted. I think right now it's at about 37 or 38, and it just points out the kind of ineffectualness of the public response to this serious societal problem and pointing out that we are the only country in which this is a continuing issue. So if they're raising awareness of that, I think that's a really good thing.
Dana Taylor:
And then looking back at the ethical standards for the Onion, when they're riffing on sensitive topics, back in your day when you were there, the way you view it today, what are those standards?
Christine Wence:
Well, you'd have to talk to them now, but I think The Onion, I mean, they have stepped over the line a few times. I think that's true, but I do think that they're on the side of men and women. They're on the side of the people who are affected by the decisions made by people in power, and I think that as long as they're focused on that as the place where they're coming from and where their proper target should be, I think that that gives them a decent ethical standing in most cases I think.
Dana Taylor:
Christine, I'm sure you know that there is a popular subreddit, it's called Not The Onion, and they highlight real stories and headlines that something could have been written by The Onion. The Onion was originally circulated in print. Do you think it would've become as well-known as it is if it had been launched during the age of social media? And I think you've answered this, but do you think that it still cuts through the noise?
Christine Wence:
Yeah, I mean, people have asked me if The Onion could be become what it was, and I think that the competition now is so intense. There's just so much more than there was in the eighties and nineties even. So yeah, breaking through all that I think is really difficult. So yeah, when they started as paper, they got a really strong local following, and then people were subscribing to The Onion from all across the country, and then when they went online in 96, that's what really made them take off. So there was almost an irony in the history of The Onion because the internet is what made them famous, but the internet is also sort of what caused a lot of traditional media, including The Onion in a way, a lot of problems later on down the line.
Dana Taylor:
In 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, the Onion published an issue with a satirical take on the tragedy. There was an article titled "Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake." The reception was mixed. What was your take on that publication and what kinds of things were you hearing at the time about that?
Christine Wence:
Well, my understanding that the reception of that issue was extremely positive. They received thousands and thousands of emails and faxes. That's when people sent faxes, praising the issue and telling The Onion that it really helped a lot of people laugh for the first time because it came out just two weeks after the attack. So I know the comedy community also held them in extremely high regard after that issue came out.
Dana Taylor:
Satire can make us think, it can also make us laugh. Do you have a favorite Onion story or headline?
Christine Wence:
Oh, so, so many. There's been thousands and thousands of headlines. I have a penchant for the science and the kind of silly ones. One I always liked is "Archeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People," which you have to sort of think about it for a minute. There's a lot of good archeology ones, but there are many, many funny and interesting and actually kind of sometimes sort of complicated and sad stories about people finding Onion articles to be true, thinking that it was real, which often happens when stories are kind of taken out of their context and seen a different way. In the new context, sometimes it's hard to tell whether things are real or not, and so I think many, many people have been fooled by The Onion for sure.
Dana Taylor:
You were there at the beginning. Can you describe the energy and some of the minds that created The Onion, who you've said are the creators of modern American news satire?
Christine Wence:
I was there early on when the staff was a bunch of 18 to 20-year-old undergraduate students working out of a dumpy student apartment on campus, and a lot of the paper was basically made up at 2:00 in the morning before it had to go to the printer a few hours later. But there was a lot of, being in a creative environment with a bunch of young people was very fun. There's all kinds of crazy, silly things happening all the time. That was gone by about the early nineties, but the 1990s staff, that was the group that really took The Onion to the next level. I think they're the ones that made The Onion into a parody of USA Today as people thought about it at the time. The newspaper that is.
A number of them became committed to satirizing from probably a progressive point of view I would say. That became really important. That's when they also started really adhering to AP style, and they were the people that really created the Onion's sort of mature voice, if you could say, if you could call it mature, in that period of time. So that was an amazing group of people, and a lot of those people are pictured on the front of the book actually.
Dana Taylor:
So I'm not going to let this go. I was surprised to learn that USA Today is actually part of the Genesis story of The Onion. You wrote about one of its co-founders, Tim Keck, growing up in rural Wisconsin where there were only two newspapers available. One of them was USA Today, the other was the Oshkosh Northwestern, and he had very unflattering things to say about both of them. As I mentioned, you were there at the beginning, part of the original staff from 1988, about 1990. Fast-forward to this moment, you're discussing The Onion and your book with USA Today. Is this a strange full circle moment for you? I mean, the Onion is now a massive media brand itself.
Christine Wence:
Yeah, I definitely laughed when I saw that. Oh, wow, it's USA Today. Do they know about the whole thing? Yeah, no, it's been so interesting to see how... Because part of what I did with the book is tell the story of media and the news since the eighties, as well as the history of The Onion, because The Onion has been satirizing and making foot of flaws and omissions, I would say, in mainstream media since that time in a lot of different ways. And at the same time, the Onion has become very popular.
So the way The Onion is kind of mainstream now, and many people from the Onion have gone on to write for... The people from the Onion were instrumental in creating the Daily Show and Bear Report, and all the late night shows now have had Onion people working for them. The Onion is kind of spread its influence very broadly, but all kind of under the radar. And it's interesting because I also know that journalists love the Onion. They say The Onion says things that we wish we could say and we can't say. And so I find that really interesting too. So I think The Onion is aware that journalists actually love them even though they're often making fun of what journalists do.
Dana Taylor:
Your book is rich with all of these characters. Why did you want to write this book? I know you did extensive research for it.
Christine Wence:
Yeah, I mean, I started this book way back in 2018, right before that pandemic, and I just moved back to Madison from the East Coast where I'd been for about 25 years. And this was during the first just big discussion about fake news, like the bad fake news. So everybody was thinking about that and talking about that a lot. I was going back to my college town, so naturally I started thinking about the stuff I did back in college, and then I also started wondering, I wonder what The Onion people think about all of this and the way the discourse has changed and the way that news has changed.
So all of that really made me want to write the book, as well as learning for myself more about the history of news and journalism since that time. So yeah, I did many, many, many interviews, talked to tons of people, and they were just... As you've mentioned, there's so many characters. There's so many just smart, funny, and interesting, and just weirdos that have been through The Onion and it was very, very fun to meet a lot of those folks and talk to them. It was great.
Dana Taylor:
It was very interesting to read this book, and I'll just say, I enjoyed the USA Today shout out. It made me laugh. The book is called Funny Because It's True. It's on bookshelves now. Thank you so much for being on the excerpt, Christine.
Christine Wence:
Thank you for having me, Dana.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.