FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S TRUE

The unlikely tale of America’s funniest publication.

Just about anybody with an internet connection has seen a headline from the satirical newspaper The Onion, which specializes in deadpan parodies of traditional news stories (“Call Ignored in the Order It Was Received”) and op-eds (“It’s Not a Crack House, It’s a Crack Home”). But as Wenc shows in this thorough and thoughtful history, the publication needed time to find its footing and often struggled despite its cultural ubiquity. Founded in 1988 by a group of University of Wisconsin students, it was initially a casual, try-anything Gen X affair. (Explaining its name, an editor says, “We ate onion sandwiches a lot.”) But by the mid-1990s, after honing its editorial voice and (crucially) getting online early, it was effectively printing money, prompting various, often ill-fated expansion efforts. It moved operations to New York just before 9/11; investments in video often went sideways (a big-budget Onion movie went straight to video); and writers often tangled with ownership, most prominently in 2012 when operations were moved back to Chicago despite vociferous protests by staff, who attempted a failed end-run around the owners. Wenc, an editor during the paper’s earliest days, spoke with nearly all the major players, sometimes getting deep in the weeds of the publication’s ever-shifting business strategy. But she consistently returns to a central irony in the Onion story: A publication designed to critique a cold-hearted, corporatized America had become an example of what it was attacking. “The Onion had long fought…ever-expanding media pollution and stupidity through courage, locality, and iconoclasm,” Wenc writes, but ownership and Trumpism’s own approach to fake news has often undermined its mission. To that end, the book is not just newspaper history, but an obituary for a generation’s countercultural principles.

Serious reading about funny business.