Book Review: ‘Funny Because It’s True,’ by Christine Wenc

FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire, by Christine Wenc

When I told a very funny editor that a new book about The Onion had dropped, he assumed I was referring to the vegetable and that this work must be savory kin to John McPhee’s “Oranges” (1967).

Sadly, this is a sign of how much the satirical news organization, founded in 1988, has faded from our national consciousness. And possibly a sign that we no longer have a national consciousness, pulverized as it’s been in the decades since by the almighty algorithm.

“Funny Because It’s True,” by a former Onion copy editor, Christine Wenc, follows several recent, muscular oral histories of legacy media by ex-staff members, including “Paper of Wreckage,” about The New York Post, and “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” on The Village Voice.

Oral histories involve the clever and discreet arrangement of other people’s block quotes, like guests at a dinner party. At some point Wenc, who also edited the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger and has worked on Midwestern prairie ecosystem restoration (bless her), decided she’d be a more assertive and philosophical host and do a “prose history” instead.

It includes plenty of front-page reprints; financial breakdowns in both senses of the word; and the winning entry, in verse, of an essay contest about our country that ends, “I like it here and so should you/Shoobydoobydoobydoo.”

The author ventures beyond The Onion’s alumni (alliums?) and prodigious archive, considering the trickster archetype (“Does the trickster help us or hurt us? Yes”); excoriating corporate capitalism and the erosion of local investigative reporting; and tucking in asides of environmental advocacy. Though her book sometimes gets bogged down in memories of petty interoffice conflict and gossip of the kind I never engage in, it is meticulously researched, with an appealing what-the-heck wildness.

The Onion started as a simple cut-and-paste newspaper, the extracurricular whim of two undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin at Madison — “a city that’s constantly doing OK,” as a former student and onetime editor, Ben Karlin, puts it, replete with farmers’ markets and touring indie bands.

It was named after the onion sandwiches the founders enjoyed, with no deeper meaning — though its life has indeed been pungent and layered.

Stuffed at first with cartoons and clip-out coupons, The Onion was a retort of sorts to the dueling campus newspapers on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and to the ascendant, bland USA Today.

Other publications boasted big personalities and famous alumni — Nora Ephron! Norman Mailer! The Onion’s ethos was more Gen X slacker, self-deprecating and celebrity-adjacent, if anything.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s younger sister sold ads; the legendary Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s grandson was hired to help develop short-form videos; and Ginger Rogers’ copyright attorney did legal work for the staff pro bono, just because he was such a fan.

The signature Onion article, if you’ve been hiding under a TikTok, is unbylined and written in the style of the A.P. news wire service (the one recently banned from the Oval Office for refusing to substitute President Donald Trump’s preferred term “Gulf of America” for “Gulf of Mexico”). The headlines are sometimes the entire joke, or at least they telegraph the joke:

“Everybody’s Eatin’ Bread!” (1990)

“Study: Depression Hits Losers Hardest.” (1997)

“Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible.” (2000)

“Little things big, big things little,” is how a founder, Tim Keck, explains the formula. “It’s a satire of a feeling of what newspapers are, rather than a specific political thing.”

From the beginning, readers have been fooled, perhaps most notoriously the Republican congressman who reposted “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex” on his Facebook page in 2011.

Scrappy and nerdy, the periodical generated several books, including the No. 1 best seller “Our Dumb Century” (1999), which won the Thurber Prize for American humor, and the Onion News Network, a parody TV news show that got a Peabody. They knew they’d truly arrived after being invited to play in a magazine softball league in Central Park, once almost killing The Paris Review’s George Plimpton with a line drive.

But though some writers, like Karlin, went on to soar in showbiz, The Onion’s rebellious spirit and disdain for selling out, plus some simple bad luck, got in the way of the brand hitting it big. The dot-com boom passed it by. “There was just money swirling all around us,” recalls the editor who originated arts reviews, which would become the spinoff A.V. Club. “We were trying to catch it, and none of it, none of it, landed in our hands.”

A deal with Comedy Central fell through. The editorial staff moved to New York, epicenter of the media, right before 9/11. As commentators pronounced ponderously on the death of irony, a trenchant issue themed to the calamity (“U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever We’re at War With”) doubled the Onion audience.

Then came social media and, now, artificial intelligence. Fake news went from being a form of entertainment to a political talking point. The Onion, which moved operations to Chicago, rolls on. Last August, it defiantly reintroduced a print edition, marking the occasion with an article headlined “New York Times to Cease Publication.” In December, despite support from parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, a judge blocked its attempted takeover of Infowars, Alex Jones’s conspiracy website.

The Onion’s account on X has 11 million followers. A subreddit devoted to real stories so unbelievable readers need to be reassured that this is Not The Onion? Over twice that.

FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire | By Christine Wenc | Running Press | 336 pp. | $30