Onion Nation

Onion Nation

If its absurdist twists and wicked parodies of conventional journalism are just a joke, the country's leading satirical newspaper is having the last laugh

By Wells Tower
Sunday, November 16, 2008; Page W08


If you were a prospective gag headline, you would probably feel about the writers' room at the Onion the way World War II soldiers felt about the view of Omaha Beach as the landing craft doors yawned open. By midafternoon on a Monday, at the paper's SoHo offices in Manhattan, the writers at America's most successful satirical newsweekly had mowed down somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 possible headlines in search of a dozen or so solid comic premises around which an issue of the paper would be built.

In an inversion of the traditional editorial process, the Onion chooses its headlines and then invents stories to fit them. For a headline to have made the first cut, at least two of the six writers in attendance had to okay it, generally an occasion of little fanfare in which a couple of people threw up their hands and murmured with a defeated sigh, "Sure, why the hell not?" Among the survivors were "Sudanese Man Best In Village At Stacking Bodies"; "Really Loud Whistle Guy Takes Every Opportunity To Whistle Loudly"; "Steven Tyler Laid Off From Aerosmith As Band Jobless Rate Hits 20%"; "Kid Not Sure What To Do With Sex And The City Action Figures"; "Bill Clinton Sadly Folds First Lady Dress Back Into Box"; "Price of Gas Rises To Four Expletives Per Gallon"; "50-Year-Old Prince Licks AARP Representative's Face"; and "Op-Ed: It Figures That Right After I Wash My Car, It Rains Blood."

The choicest material -- the staff writers' ideas -- had been pitched this morning, and the writers were sorting through the chaff, the jokes sent in each week by part-time contributors, known in local editorial parlance as "the list." The writers fidgeted and slumped in their chairs, visibly oppressed by the haze of failed hilarity thickening in the room.

Fallen cannon fodder included: "Face Of God Seen On Bus Ad For God"; "California Courts To See What Else They Can Marry"; "Meter Attendant Accidentally Tries To Collect Change From Vending Machine"; and the following op-ed: "You're Breaking The Human Half Of My Cyborg Heart," which caused senior writer Dan Guterman to groan and offer a counter-headline, " 'I Suck,' By A Joke."

Though individual writers would ultimately spin into full stories those headlines that survived a second culling, the paper is a thoroughly collaborative effort, with pretty much every member of the staff getting an equal vote. "We find that the creative process works much better when we function as a kind of collective mind," said top editor Joe Randazzo, an unassuming 30-year-old who doesn't radiate any boss-ish swagger in meetings and whom no one on the staff seems scared of or desperate to impress. "There are times when a joke gets mired in semantics, and I have to tell everybody to shut the hell up. But that happens pretty rarely, probably once every couple of issues, when a story needs a definitive yes or no."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110701942.html?hpid=features1&hpv=national&sid=ST2008111303130&s_pos=

and r&k