Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (24 page)

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-famous 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.

There’s something particularly detestable about people who are stupid and completely wrong but still have attitude. It’s funny to hear these characters spout off when you know what’s in store for them. I wrote columns by a recurring op-ed character named Amber Richardson, with headlines like “I Hope My Baby Doesn’t Come Out All Fucked-Up and Shit” and “My Baby Don’t Want No Medicine.” She was a teen mom who was always railing against her “bitch social worker.” This sixteen-year-old single mother is probably at a high point in her life, complaining about her poor social worker and ragging on her friends.

I earned a teaching degree in college. I did my student teaching at a high school in Madison for pregnant teens. It was pretty sad. A couple of the girls were smoking specifically because they had heard it would make the baby smaller—they thought it would make the labor less painful if the baby was small. One girl “stole” another girl’s baby name, Rae Rae, after giving birth first. There was a lot of material that you never would have ever thought up if you were trying to write for a teen mom. You just had to hear it.

Do you see a difference now between your sensibility and the sensibility of the current, younger writers for
The Onion
?

I think writers for
The Onion
are still mostly weirdos. And
The Onion
’s use of freelance writers contributes to that, too. There are people who can live in Michigan and submit jokes every week out of their parents’ basement.

I think there is a new thing that I’ve noticed where more younger people have begun to see comedy as a viable career and approach it that way. It’s not that they’re not funny and talented; they are, but they also go about it with a goal in mind. They know they have to work up their résumé and get their foot in the door at various places. This is so foreign to the way I started and how the older comedy writers I know started. They were doing comedy because they felt like they didn’t fit into the jobs they were supposed to pursue. So they did this other thing as an outlet. And then when they started to make money, it was almost surprising.

In 2013, you were hired as a writer on the TV show
Community
. What’s the difference between writing for
Community
and for
The Onion
?

Writing for
Community
is, of course, very different than writing for
The Onion
. The show is [comedy writer and producer] Dan Harmon’s show—he created and runs it. When you’re writing for it, you’re writing for him. At
The Onion
, our goal was to maintain the consistency of the “
Onion
voice.” Because it was this collective thing, and there was no single creator, we could argue endlessly about what was in the
Onion
voice and what wasn’t. The whole process was very democratic—in both good and bad ways.

The
Onion
voice at its best is rather cold and stiff and clinical, which I suppose is why the hive-mind system works so well.
Community
, on the other hand, is a very warm show, and that’s because of Dan Harmon and his love for his characters. People who don’t watch it sometimes have the misconception that
Community
is all genre parody and pop culture references—I myself made that mistake before I actually saw it. But the genius of
Community
is that even within those genre-joke episodes it never sells out its characters or abandons the emotionality of the story.

Dan Harmon, who began his career as an improv performer in Milwaukee and then began writing for TV in 1999, is notorious for breaking down the plots and storylines in a very analytical way.

Dan has a method for breaking stories, a modified version of the hero’s journey. The character leaves his zone of comfort, has a road of trials, and returns home having changed. It’s physically represented with a circle divided into four parts. We use these circles each time we’re working on a specific story. We spend all day drawing them on the dry-erase boards, marking them up, erasing them, drawing new ones. I literally see these circles in my sleep. Last night, I was dreaming about a vacation I’m about to take, and in my dream I was using Dan Harmon’s circle to figure out what I should do on the trip. This system is a great way to make sure that your stories aren’t too plotty and linear. It helps you wrestle endless options into an emotionally meaningful story. I will definitely use it whenever I write something from now on. I’m learning a lot from Dan.
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