Best of: How ‘The Onion’ made modern news satire

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

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Brian Mackey: Today on the 21st show, the story of The Onion. Born in the Midwest in 1988, the satirical newspaper has come a long way. It's also influenced the culture of news satire, including such phenomena as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. We'll talk about all that with Christine Wentz. She was part of the original Onion team, and now she's written a history of the paper called Funny Because It's True. I'm Brian Mackey with Christine Wentz today on the 21st show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media, airing on WILL in Urbana, WUIS in Springfield, WNIJ in Rockford DeKalb, WVIK in the Quad Cities, and WSIU in Carbondale. But first, news.

From Illinois Public Media, this is the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. The way we find out what's happening in the world has changed a lot in recent years. Once newspapers were the authoritative source, even as radio and TV took hold. But now, to the extent that we do follow headlines, the internet is where we do it.

The satirical newspaper The Onion has, over the past four decades, not only made fun of the news and the way we digest it, it's also been a part of many of those changes. The paper has its roots in the Midwest, specifically Madison, Wisconsin, 1988. After years of local and regional success, its humor found a new home and national attention on the internet, and its stories have made their mark, from headlines such as Midwest Discovered between East and West Coasts, to video stories like this.

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Speaker 1: Congress has passed a bill naming incomprehensible shouting the official language of the United States. After attracting the attention of several leaders in Washington last year, the initiative's political supporters argued for months that the nation should formally recognize incomprehensible shouting as the only truly American way to communicate.

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Brian Mackey: I'm sick and tired of listening to people who say that Americans should not know what they know and that's not what it is and what the policy is. The redblooded American is what we have in this day and age.

The past few decades have taken The Onion through many ups and downs, from navigating comedy in the aftermath of 9/11, to the rise of internet video, and then clickbait, and then in recent years, the question of what it even means to be satirical in a world where truth cannot be taken for granted.

Christine Wentz was part of The Onion back when it was getting started. She worked for the upstart paper as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She went on to a career in writing, editing, art, and history, and now she's written a book about The Onion's history. It's called Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire. It's available from Running Press.

Christine joined us for a conversation that first aired in March 2026, so that means we're not taking calls on the show today, but you will hear from several people in our texting group, answering the question, what's your favorite Onion article or headline that stuck with you? Or when did you realize satire had gotten at some deeper truth? Or what role does satire have in a post-truth world?

If you want to be a part of this show, answering questions like that before we go to air and then being part of the broadcast, you can do that by joining our texting group. Send the word talk to 217-803-0730. Again, text the word talk to 217-803-0730.

All right. Here now, Christine Wentz on the history of The Onion. All right, Christine, The Onion's motto is — uh, two words, it's Latin — apparently it translates to "you are stupid" or "you are dumb." What does that motto represent?

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, so when I first started working on this book, I didn't actually know exactly, and I thought, well, that's not a very nice motto, you know. And then, but after I talked to people, I realized that what they're referring to is the sort of sheep-like behavior of the American news-consuming public to sort of believe whatever they're told and what authorities tell them to do. And so The Onion has a sort of persona of being this all-knowing, all-encompassing, you know, monolithic news source, and that motto relates to the point of view of this satirical, monolithic news voice.

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Brian Mackey: And it turns out a lot of us are pretty stupid, right?

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. It's very hard to tell, especially these days, what's real and what isn't, and a lot of the ways that we used to use to discern what's true or not are sort of rapidly being dissolved by AI and other things. So yeah, we're in a really interesting time right now.

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Brian Mackey: AI and other things — other things being bad actors in our society — but we can talk about that as we go on. What made the Midwest and Madison, Wisconsin in particular, you know, fertile ground, so to speak, for something like The Onion to take root?

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, I think The Onion is very Midwestern. There are a couple of different reasons. I think that, you know, the Midwest sort of has an anonymous feel to it, and The Onion, you know, didn't use bylines and never used bylines, really. There were some fake ones early on, but The Onion is written anonymously. You know, people from the Midwest typically aren't pushy about seeking fame and fortune, and I think that definitely applies to The Onion. It doesn't mean you're not interested in it succeeding, but there's a kind of a different style in the Midwest, I think. And in the Midwest, you know, as that headline about Midwest Discovered between East and West Coasts — you know, we're sort of overlooked by, you know, the coastal elites — and I'm saying that in quotes — and big media and that sort of thing. So all of that really informed The Onion's point of view. The Onion also was created by Gen X Midwesterners, and so that kind of takes this all sort of times 10, I think.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, Gen X, so we can get into that too. But let's talk a little bit about the media environment that The Onion came into in the 1980s, right? What — for those, you know, I'm imagining some of our listeners were not around then and didn't know what things were like. We didn't all have these glowing rectangles in our pockets.

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Christine Wentz: Right, exactly. So there were a lot of changes, and the book — I like to say that Funny Because It's True is actually a sort of stealth history of the media since the '80s, as it's told through the lens of The Onion. So I'm kind of giving that history with a little bit of like sugar and jokes on top, which is, I think, what The Onion does too.

But in the '80s, there were a lot of things happening with deregulation on the federal level. There was the beginning of this sort of monopolistic kind of takeover of media that was really kind of revving up. Cable TV news was just getting going, and all of that was really starting to rapidly kind of degrade the sort of staid, reliable, kind of calm Walter Cronkite world of the '70s — this kind of the '50s through the '80s, I would say. And all that was like kind of rapidly being replaced. And there were all these kind of ridiculous things happening with news becoming entertainment. Ratings for the news now became a thing. And so The Onion was kind of coming into that environment and responding to that in a lot of ways.

And the founder of The Onion, Tim Keck, actually came from a Chicago-area newspaper family. His dad was an editor at the Hammond Times of Hammond, Indiana. He was the president of the Chicago Area Newspaper Association. His mom was a really amazing investigative reporter for environmental issues in the 1970s and 1980s. And all of that kind of tragically came to an end, and then, you know, I thought it was very interesting that a few years later, Tim founds The Onion.

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Brian Mackey: You know, I still get a community newspaper delivered to my house once a week — that's mostly headlines about prep sports and then wire copy. But can you talk about some of the local news inspiration for The Onion, right? I'm looking at some of these early front pages you have in the book — you know, "Dead Guy Found" —

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Christine Wentz: That's my friend Matt Cook with his head buried up in the snow bank there. Yeah. So yeah, so everybody — yes, some consider that the first real Onion story. That's from the first year of The Onion.

Yeah, a lot of the staff of The Onion were all — I mean, everyone was like, you know, 19, 20, 21 years old, so very young, but almost everyone had come from Midwestern, either small towns or rural or small-town Midwestern environments, and everyone had experiences with these local papers. You know, I grew up in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and we had a great local paper. Everything in it was, you know, the sports teams and the spelling bee and things like that, which is fine. But definitely everybody at The Onion had really grown up reading these Midwestern kind of local newspapers, and that absolutely affected the, the whole [Area Man] thing. That's where that comes from.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. How — there's a picture of the very first front page of the very first issue of The Onion. How does that compare to what The Onion would become even a few years later, right? Both in form and content.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, so The Onion story is also, I also tell it as like a history of the changes in technology. So The Onion was created on kind of the first round of like desktop publishing, as we called it back in the day. And so the first issue of The Onion was created in a very early version of PageMaker on, you know, an ancient Mac Classic. There was one computer in the office that we all shared. And the first version is this very, you know, amateur — you know, kind of put together by 20-year-olds who have no idea what they're doing.

But from the very beginning, there were — there was a satirical story on the front page. It was more like Weekly World News kind of parody at that time, but it really started the tradition of doing that fake news and using the illustrations and the visuals to emphasize that. And later on, it became, you know, much more professionalized, and it kind of elaborated — but that first issue really does kind of indicate where The Onion would go in a few years.

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Brian Mackey: So you're not a founder, but you are like a day-one presence with The Onion, right?

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, exactly, literally day one. Like, Tim Keck was my roommate, and I remember him coming back from a trip and saying, "We're gonna start a newspaper," and I was like, OK. Like, nobody knew what that meant or how to do that, you know. Although he kind of did, because of growing up in a newspaper family, so it was like a logical thing for him to do. So yeah, a bunch of, you know, 20-year-old UW-Madison undergrads, you know, just got together in an apartment and were like, OK, we're gonna make this thing and we don't know what it's gonna be, and it's gotta go to press pretty soon, so we'll just make up all the stories. And that's kind of how it happened.

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Brian Mackey: So what was your role in making The Onion in those —

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Christine Wentz: I mean, early on I was — they asked me to be the art director. I didn't know what that was. But I actually became the copy editor, but I did do some illustrations. And basically at that point in time, it's like a startup, you know. Everybody sort of did everything. So, you know, I helped a little bit with brainstorming stories. I helped develop them and write them. But sort of everybody did everything.

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Brian Mackey: All right, let me take a moment to remind listeners, this is the 21st show. We're listening back to our conversation on the history of The Onion, the satirical newspaper. It's the subject of a book by Christine Wentz called Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

Do you have a favorite Onion headline that stuck with you? For me, one that comes to mind is, "You Will Suffer Humiliation When the Sports Team From My Area Defeats the Sports Team From Your Area."

Since we're on tape, we cannot take any calls live, but many of you talked about your favorite headlines and your favorite Onion memories when this first aired, and we'll return now to a call we took from Tim in Franklin Grove.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, hi. I got introduced to The Onion decades ago as my uncle up in Madison would bring down a copy now and then to my little farm by Franklin Grove. I ended up tracking elephants in Cameroon, Central Africa for a couple of years, and he sent me a care package including a couple copies of The Onion. I read them, had my laugh, left them in the village, but when I came back to the village a few months later, people looked at me in disbelief. Having read it, not knowing it was satire, they had quite a few questions about what was going on in our country.

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Brian Mackey: It's not just people in rural Cameroon that don't quite understand its satire, as we can get into. Tim, do you have a favorite story?

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Speaker 3: [It] passed around to quite a few people around the five villages in Cameroon, and they just shook their head when they saw me last, you know, the next time. I love it.

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Brian Mackey: Tim, thanks so much for calling in. Appreciate it. Christine — how about that? I guess this is a good time to talk about the people who sort of take The Onion to be more authoritative than it is.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, I mean, The Onion has always delivered everything completely straight. I mean, that's part of the absolute ethos of the Onion style of humor. And I don't know, there's just — people see things in print, and it's like the critical thinking part of your brain just shuts off or something. And so even from year one, the most ridiculous — like clearly, like amateurly presented and, you know, awkwardly written stories would be taken as real, you know.

And so I do go into a sort of theory in the book about a couple of reasons why that happens. But I mean, it happens to all kinds of people. There's been politicians that have circulated Onion stories as if they were true, usually because the story confirms something they already believed, you know, about the public. There's been international stories about, you know, like the Chinese government thought Onion stories were true.

So, you know, they're playing with a form that makes it — you really have to put on your critical thinking brain to really understand what's happening. And so in the book, I do also talk about the development, you know, after 2015 or so, of what I call bad fake news. The Onion is good fake news; it's satire trying to make the world a better place. Bad fake news — you know, Fox News, Infowars, that sort of thing — are using the news format to do something really different.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. And it's like, if you put it in a newspaper, if you put it on the radio — you're Orson Welles and you report on an alien attack — or if you, you know, say it from the steps of Congress, people are primed to think it's true, whether it is or not. Yeah, it short-circuits that.

All right, a couple of text messages from listeners we got in about The Onion — which we're talking about today because we're speaking with Christine Wentz, author of Funny Because It's True, a history of The Onion and, as the subhead says, how The Onion created modern American news satire.

We heard from Lloyd in Danville who said, not familiar with The Onion, but the truth of the matter about satire is that on rare occasions, those inflicted by it can come to the realization that the joke is indeed on them. Satire does bring about change in practice, sort of societal consciousness.

And John in Iliopolis said so many classic headlines to choose from — I guess he is familiar with The Onion. A couple of favorites come to mind: "337 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster." "Drugs Win Drug War" is another one. John says, I've always been a fan of satire, from Mad Magazine as a kid, to the National Lampoon, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Onion. Good satire can often reveal truths that elude conventional news reporting. Satire remains essential in today's world of head-shaking headlines.

All right, we're gonna continue with Christine Wentz. Her book is Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire. More to come with Christine Wentz after a short break. This is the 21st show. Stay with us.

It's the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. We're listening back to our conversation on the history of The Onion, the satirical newspaper and website, and its role in our culture and our media. This program first aired in March 2026, so no live calls today, but plenty of you shared your thoughts when this first aired via text. And I should mention, you can join our texting group by sending the word talk to 217-803-0730.

Ben in Champaign said this segment can't air without at least a mention of the depressingly evergreen Point Counterpoint entitled "This War Will Destabilize the Entire Mideast Region and Set Off a Shockwave of Anti-Americanism" versus "No It Won't."

We also heard from Aaron in Springfield who said the sadly oft-posted headline, "No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens," is peak Onion to me. Our country faces a number of problems that other similar countries seem to have solved, mass shootings being among the most dramatic, and The Onion perfectly points this out time and time again.

On the lighter side, Aaron says, I'm also quite fond of the Diamond Joe characterization of Joe Biden during the Obama administration.

Joining us for this conversation was Christine Wentz, who worked on the paper in its earliest years in Madison, Wisconsin. More recently, she's the author of Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

So, Christine, The Onion — it's obviously very much fiction, but it's deeply rooted in the truth. Talk about that dichotomy.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, I just want to mention, by the way, that the gun violence headline — that's been reposted something like 42 times at this point, since it first came out, I think in about 2016. So, yeah.

There's something about the way that satire and humor works that allows people to kind of get to the point sort of immediately. And The Onion, because of its format, can really say things that I think other — that sort of real journalists wish they could say, and they can't somehow, using their format.

The Onion is always — in their way of writing, they're also, when they are working on stories, very clear about what their target is. I gained a lot of respect for The Onion's writing and editorial process while I was working on this book. Everything seems sort of effortless, but, you know, it's kind of like when you see a really great stand-up comedian, and you don't realize that they've been working on that routine for like two years before you hear it. The Onion works really, really hard to make their work really, really sharp — just dead on target — and I think that's part of their ability to tell the truth.

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Brian Mackey: Including a lot of attention to Associated Press style, right? The AP Stylebook. Maybe you can talk about that.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, so they — especially when The Onion was kind of developing its mature voice, if we could call it that — in around '94, '95, '96 — it really made a move toward very concrete and very dead-on, deadpan AP style. They had a copy editor named Stephen Thompson, who's at NPR now, who was absolutely maniacal about making every news story in The Onion adhere to AP style.

And so AP style can have this sort of "pretend like you don't know anything" strange naivete before you write an article. And so The Onion kind of takes that and puts this insane material into this very straight format, and that contrast really makes it funny. I think a lot of Onion jokes work because they're in AP style. If you kind of told a similar joke in a different format, it might not work as well. But AP style is like the straight man to their comedy.

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Brian Mackey: I understand even in their pitch meetings, at least back in the day, I've heard that you had to present it in like a very neutral sort of deadpan way, right? You can't be like, "Oh, this is a good one, guys, listen up, listen up."

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, no, exactly, exactly, yeah. And they — you know, now typically the way the headline meetings work is every writer brings in like 20, 25 headlines, and then they all recite them out, and only the ones that everybody thinks are the best get in the paper.

Although on the Onion News Network, they used to do this with a little running ticker at the bottom of the screen. And now the new Onion's website also has a little ticker at the top of their screen. And I look at those, and some of those are really, really funny headlines, but I can pretty much guarantee you that they're also the headlines that came up in pitch meetings that didn't warrant a whole story, but the headline was funny on its own, so there it is. It's like recycling.

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Brian Mackey: It's, uh, yeah, multi-use for content. Patty calling from Ottawa on line 4. Patty, thanks for calling in. Hello, how are you? I'm well, thank you for calling. I understand you are an Onion fan.

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Speaker 4: Yes, I just want to say that me and my ex-husband used to — we used to love the — I think it's one of the first ones — ["Holy (bleep), Man Lands on Moon"]. We had that like framed. We could not — we loved The Onion. It gave us humor, and especially in these times, we need this kind of humor. We need laughter. We need down-to-earth, great hysterical laughter, and The Onion has provided that for years. And I just want to say thank you for putting something out there like that. I'm an avid — also a Mad Magazine fan. So any kind of humor that you have given — in the past, in your paper — we have enjoyed it, and our friends have enjoyed it. I just want to say thank you. We need humor, and The Onion has provided that all these years.

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Brian Mackey: All right, Patty, thank you so much for calling in. And I'll just say, listeners, some of our listeners might have missed a little of Patty's comments because she referred to a headline that was "Holy [bleep], Man Lands on Moon" — but she did not say the bleep. So, we cannot swear on public radio — we're in enough trouble with the federal government as it is. Please don't create more for us. But thank you for the call, Patty.

Christine, I don't know if you want to respond to that.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, I just want to add that the man on the moon headline comes from The Onion's Thurber Award-winning book Our Dumb Century, which came out in 1999 and is absolutely a classic. It's all original work written just for this book. It was a bestseller, and it's probably one of the funniest — I had nothing to do with it, but it's one of the funniest books ever written. And it satirizes the entire 20th century through front pages from every year, and it's absolutely worth tracking down a copy. It's absolutely magnificent.

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Brian Mackey: Which people may not remember, but that was very much in vogue. There were a million of those books in 1999.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, yeah, you can find them a lot of different places. So —

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Brian Mackey: No, I just mean as a stylistic thing, right? I'm sure the New York Times had one.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, that was like — yeah, that was — they satirized the idea of, you know, it's the end of the century, and we're gonna — the New York Times did what, you know, I'm sure a lot of newspapers did — and then The Onion did one too.

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Brian Mackey: Amazing. Paul in Carbondale, line 2. Paul, thanks for calling in.

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Speaker 3: Hey, thanks for taking my call. I'm a lifelong fan of The Onion, introduced to it by my brother in downtown Chicago. We would wait for the drop-off to happen, and I remember, like, people would line up waiting for the new stack to show up. I had a buddy Jason that actually wrote for The Onion for a little while, and he was — all that — we were so proud of him. And he got one poster that was about how, um, old-school homeless are a little offended about how the new-school homeless behave, you know, they don't like it too much. And I know in Nashville specifically, I saw a headline when there were all these kickball leagues where it said a bunch of grown people get along playing kickball. I don't know if that was the exact verbiage, but it was hysterical. I'm super grateful for The Onion and what it is.

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Brian Mackey: Awesome. Thank you for that call, Paul. Max is calling from Rockford. Max, I understand you went to UW-Madison and were an Onion reader.

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Speaker 3: I did, and I just want to personally thank Christine for being a part of some of my favorite memories of going to college there and heading into [class] and grabbing the Onion newspaper on the way to class. And my favorite article was "My Vote Cancels Out Your Vote" — about an uninformed voter who relished in the fact that they were uninformed and were proud that their vote canceled out my informed vote. I can't think of a more appropriate article for these days.

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Brian Mackey: Thanks for that, Max. And one more call for now — Corey, who is actually driving to Madison, Wisconsin. Be safe, Corey, but thanks for calling in.

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Speaker 5: Hi, good afternoon — or good morning, actually. Yeah, I just wanted to share that I remember The Onion as a Gen X high schooler growing up in Madison. I wasn't even old enough to drive yet, so I would ride my bike down to State Street and pick up a copy at the Parthenon or at Ragstock or at the Union. And I just really credit The Onion with kind of awakening my young brain to the idea of meta perspective — you know, I didn't even know that word then — but the idea that we could look at a news article or, you know, a TV news story and kind of process that at a level different than face value, to think critically about why are they saying this and what's going on here. So real fond memories of The Onion from the early ['90s] days.

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Brian Mackey: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Corey. Appreciate the call.

I want to return to this idea that people think The Onion is real. We got a text from Tina in Urbana who said she discovered The Onion in the early 2000s through, she says, an article about the molestation of children by Catholic priests. She says she read it aloud to her roommates. And she goes on, quote, "As I'm beginning to reprimand them for downright laughing at me, they told me what The Onion was and what satire was. They explained The Onion's purpose, and we went back through the article discussing why they would write satire about such sensitive topics. They helped me understand how The Onion was highlighting a very real, very disturbing reality behind how people in power respond to such horrifying events. This actually quite impacted my interest in current events and influenced my ability to think critically." Tina, thank you so much for that.

Christine, talk about — you actually have like five or six points in the book, I'm trying to remember, about why you think people take The Onion as real.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, I just want to say I really appreciate the comments about The Onion teaching people to think critically, because that's like the point of news satire. That's the kind of — that was the point of The Daily Show, the point of The Colbert Report. I mean, they're using that format to say something more than just something that gets a laugh.

But yeah, I should find the page — I don't have the book open to that page — but there are a couple of different reasons why people think news articles are true. One is just simply that it's in print. I kind of talked about that before. I think that probably affects older people at this point rather than younger people who are used to, you know, conversing in text and stuff like that. But back in the day, it wasn't in print unless it had been edited and supposedly fact-checked and that sort of thing. So I can see how that can mess with people's minds.

But one of the things that I think affects people's willingness to believe a fake news story as being true is when it kind of confirms something they already believe, right? So there was a Republican congressperson who sent around on his Facebook page The Onion headline "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion [Abortionplex]" — because he thought it was real. You know, "see what the liberals are doing," right.

But there's also one that was sort of kind of heartbreaking to me — that sometimes people believe a story because it fulfills a need that they have, emotionally, you know, medically. So there's a story about cigarettes called —

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Brian Mackey: I have it in front of me here. "New Smokable Nicotine Sticks — Can They Help Smokers Quit?"

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Christine Wentz: Exactly, yeah. And unfortunately, The Onion received a whole bunch of calls from people desperate to stop smoking saying, where can I find these new smokable nicotine sticks? Yeah, it's sad.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. And then you also have irrational fears and — I guess this is the big one — the inability to discern multilayeredness or irony. Yeah, this is a chronic condition in American life.

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Christine Wentz: Yeah, no, I really believe that's true. There's something about the way that digital media has made this a lot worse, I think, because digital media is about like activating your lizard brain and getting you to click on stuff, and that's like the opposite of deep reading. It's the opposite of kind of a slow, kind of gradual, kind of in-depth understanding that you get, say, when you read a novel. And, you know, The Onion was written by people that had history degrees and literature degrees — people who just thought about reading and writing in a really different way — and I think that's definitely part of it.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. All right, let me remind listeners, we're speaking with Christine Wentz, author of Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

So we've talked a lot about print, but The Onion was pretty relatively early into the digital space, although it wasn't easy. I want to start off this part of the conversation with a clip. This is from the NPR show Car Talk from the mid-1990s.

Uh, here's the news. "Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia — Cities of [Zbbzvetsk] and [Grzny] to Be First Recipients." Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced U.S. plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment — the largest of its kind in American history — will provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O, and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable. Here's a quote. Clinton said, "For six years we've stood by while names like [Yandliia] and [Gloom] have been horribly butchered by millions around the world. Today, the United States must finally stand up and say enough."

So Christine, talk about how stories like that were spreading as the internet sort of grew in acceptance and popularity.

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Christine Wentz: I love that you tracked that down, by the way.

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Brian Mackey: Credit to producer Christine for that. Yeah.

[00:32:56]
Christine Wentz: Thank you. That's amazing. Yeah, so that story — it's like circa 1995 or so. This was right before The Onion created its own website in 1996. And this was back when people were sort of sending things around via email all the time, and people were typing Onion articles into emails and sending them to each other, and that's how that ended up on Car Talk. And then other people started taking credit for it, and that sort of thing.

So in 1996, The Onion made its first website. And at that point, the absolute classic writing staff had developed The Onion's voice and style. And so it came on the internet in '96, fully formed, when there were hardly any humor sites, and it just went supernova, like almost immediately. And so The Onion went from, you know, regional sort of underground paper to like, you know, hundreds of thousands of readers, like within weeks, basically.

[00:33:55]
Brian Mackey: All right, we need to take one more break on the program. When we come back, we'll have the conclusion of our conversation with Christine Wentz, who was actually a part of The Onion almost when it founded back in Wisconsin in 1988. She was the roommate of the paper's founder. Her book is Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire. This is the 21st show. Stay with us.

It's the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. We're listening back to our conversation on the history of The Onion, the satirical newspaper and website. Our guest for the hour has been Christine Wentz, who's written a book on the subject. It's called Funny Because It's True, How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

Since our program's on tape, no live calls, but our texting group had a lot to say when this first aired back in March 2026. David in Mount Morris said, my favorite news video from The Onion has always been "Breaking News: Some BS Happening Somewhere." They always have captured the humor, hypocrisy, insanity, and absurdity of the news cycle with precision accuracy, no matter who's involved. They are unbiased in their shotgun approach to humor in their articles. They're probably the only news source left in America with journalistic integrity. Yeah, it's that bad these days that I had to say that. Try not to take that personally, David. Thanks for writing in.

With that, back to our conversation with Christine Wentz on the history of The Onion.

I do want to play a couple — so we talked before the break about moving to the internet, and then, you know, we have the pivot to video, and The Onion is a big part of that in the media space. I want to listen to a few samples of the video era of The Onion.

This first one is called "Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard." "Everything is just a few hundred clicks away." Apple is calling the MacBook Wheel the most intuitive product ever designed. "Here at Apple, we like to think that we're giving customers features they don't even realize they want yet." This is a laptop with basically an iPod click wheel instead of a keyboard.

There's also "Prague's Kafka International Airport Named Most Alienating Airport."

[00:36:53]
Speaker 6: Travelers also report being frustrated by the airport's unusual security procedure, which includes a time-consuming personal interview.

[00:37:00]
Speaker 3: A security guard asked me for like 80 minutes, "Are you who you say you are? Are you who you say you are?" And finally he writes "liar" in the back of my hand and lets me pass.

[00:37:09]
Speaker 6: Airport officials say the complaints are unfounded. "All problems are traveler's own. If you only made certain to properly follow proper protocols, no such problems would exist." Properly follow proper protocols.

[00:37:23]
Brian Mackey: And this one is "10% of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills."

[00:37:30]
Speaker 7: U.S. high schoolers have dropped to 17th in science, 25th in math, and a troubling 180th place in the basic cognitive awareness most humans develop as toddlers. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is asking Congress to fund increased after-school disguise and reveal programs.

[00:37:46]
Speaker 8: I'm still here, right? By the time they get to high school, it's too late. You have to identify the problem between 15 months and 18 months.

[00:37:56]
Brian Mackey: Christine, what makes these videos so different from what The Onion did and does in print — or I guess we have to say in text nowadays?

[00:38:05]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, The Onion sort of struggled to get itself into video format for a while, but it finally really hit it in around 2010 when they started The Onion News Network. And this is kind of the entry of the millennial generation into The Onion. And they realized that to satirize cable news, you have to really be over the top with your format again. You're getting really far away from the very dry approach — although you can hear that it's still there — and they just really figured out how to represent The Onion visually in a way that hadn't been done before, and it was incredibly successful.

[00:38:43]
Brian Mackey: So, we haven't talked much about The Onion's sort of — what would you say — itinerance across the country, right? From Madison to New York, and then as we get into the early 2010s and it comes down from management to the writing team: "We're closing in New York, we're moving to Chicago, or lose your job." Talk about how that was received.

[00:39:04]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, that came as a total shock to the editorial staff. So at that point, The Onion had moved to New York in early 2001 — just the editorial staff; the business staff stayed in the Midwest, in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago. And they were doing very well in New York. They had gotten going with the Onion News Network. They were doing really hilarious stuff with social media when it was new, and doing very well. And then the word came down from above that they were going to consolidate all the operations in Chicago, which, you know, from a business point of view, I can't necessarily argue with that — why did they have two offices? That made no sense. But the editorial staff was really, really upset, and they basically tried to plot a takeover and get someone else to buy The Onion and keep them in New York, but they failed, unfortunately.

[00:39:55]
Brian Mackey: Another thing that The Onion — I mean, you talked about this book being a history of the media and changes in media. Social media is a big part of The Onion's era as well. Obviously it didn't exist when The Onion was founded or even when The Onion went online. How did that change what The Onion did?

[00:40:14]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, so The Onion went through all the same challenges with social media and the platform era that other media and news sites did. So when Facebook and YouTube and other places became these intermediaries between people and their news source — cause now you get it by clicking through, you know, an article on Facebook or something, rather than going directly to the website — they had to navigate all of that.

Their ad revenue really altered because now their ad revenue is coming online, and at first, online advertising became a huge cash cow for them, but then the bottom just completely fell out of that for them and everybody else, and then they really had to struggle for clicks.

So there was a period of time where The Onion was then sold to private equity and, you know, again, like many, many other media sites went through the same thing, and many places went under — this is the 2010s, early 2020s. The Onion managed to weather all of that somehow, until they were bought by new owners in 2024. But in the book, the book details the struggles that The Onion, as well as other media outlets, had during this time, which was very, very difficult.

[00:41:28]
Brian Mackey: And then ultimately — so you mentioned the private equity era and the sort of the challenges — ultimately it ends up back in seemingly, I guess, benevolent ownership of the name. I can't believe I'm forgetting the guy's name. Ben —

[00:41:40]
Christine Wentz: Collins.

[00:41:41]
Brian Mackey: Collins. He's [@TimOnion] on Bluesky, which is where I think of him most. Tell me about that. What is The Onion doing today, business-wise?

[00:41:51]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, so The Onion went up for sale again — they were, you know, kind of gotten rid of by their hedge fund or whoever owned them at that time. And Ben Collins was a former NBC disinformation reporter who was actually born the year The Onion was founded, in 1988. And he felt that The Onion was one of the only places that told the truth anymore.

So he teamed up with someone — a guy named Jeff Lawson, who is, you know, a rich tech guy — but he was using his money for good, we hope. And they basically bought The Onion for the purpose of setting it free. And one of the things that they did was — they won that bid to buy Infowars, which came just a few months after they bought The Onion in 2024.

And then the really great thing they did was bring back The Onion's print edition, which is now something you can subscribe to. It comes out monthly, and apparently they may have more subscribers at this point than there are to the print edition of The Washington Post. So we'll see what happens with that. But oh my God, The Onion seems to be in a new era, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[00:42:57]
Brian Mackey: What is that — do you have a — I heard an interview with you, I think it was from last year, where it was in the 30,000-something.

[00:43:04]
Christine Wentz: They're up above — last I heard, they were up above 55,000. I mean, I don't know where they are now, but Ben Collins was, you know, doing this sort of tongue-in-cheek — but maybe not completely tongue-in-cheek — that their subscribers have been going up and up, and he was like, "We're gonna beat the Washington Post" after, you know, the Washington Post kind of fired their entire news staff recently. And anyway, so I'm watching all of this with great interest.

[00:43:28]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, yeah. I appreciate they've named themselves Global Tetrahedron.

[00:43:33]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, that's from a joke from Our Dumb Century, written by former Onion head writer Todd Hanson.

[00:43:39]
Brian Mackey: Yeah. Maybe that's a good time to sort of remind us of The Onion's influence on programs like — very directly — The Colbert Report, Daily Show, other news satire, both in terms of alumni and just in terms of ethos.

[00:43:54]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, so former Onion editor Ben Karlin was tapped to be The Daily Show's head writer right when Jon Stewart was taking it over in around 2000. And so The Onion was directly involved in making that show as good as it was. Rich [Dahm], who was also a former Onion editor and writer, then became executive producer and writer for The Colbert Report. So again, The Onion has had direct influence on both of those places.

[00:44:25]
Brian Mackey: What did you learn between working at The Onion and now — especially writing this book — about what makes satire work?

[00:44:36]
Christine Wentz: Satire has to be — it's that multilayeredness. There's a lot of — there's been a lot of extremely smart and perceptive people who have come to The Onion who really, really understand how language works and can work with it in a very creative way.

It's funny when I think about just on a personal level — the odd thing that's happened with knowing — being part of The Onion from the very beginning and having read it for all this time — like, it's very easy for me to read things that aren't satire as satire now, because it works on that level. But I think that if you really pay attention to how The Onion writes, and the very economical and focused way in which they work, you can really learn a lot about just good writing by watching what The Onion does.

[00:45:29]
Brian Mackey: I wonder what it says to you that — I'm gonna share another one of my favorite all-time headlines. This is 2003: "Bassist Unaware Rock Band Christian." I don't know why that has just stuck in my head. "Brad [Rollen], the new bassist for Pillar of Salt, remains oblivious to the fact that he's in a Christian rock band, sources reported Tuesday." What does it say to you that people like me — others, some of our callers and texters — they remember these stories years, sometimes decades later?

[00:45:56]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, I've heard so many of these stories. People are like, "I've had this Onion article on my desk for 22 years," you know. I think, you know, it goes back to — The Onion — people keep saying it's the only source of truth in media, and I think that's what people are connecting to. The Onion says things that you just don't hear anywhere else, and I think that is what people really connect with. And I do as well.

[00:46:24]
Brian Mackey: So, you know, we mentioned this idea that we're in a post-truth world, some say. I mean, I still believe in truth, but other people believe in truth that's different from the facts that I understand to be true. So I guess what is the role of satire and of The Onion in a world where, to borrow that phrase, people feel entitled not only to their own opinions but their own facts?

[00:46:48]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, fact-checking has actually always been really important at The Onion, as well as at The Daily Show and other places too. I mean, they really — I think of The Onion as almost a sort of Enlightenment thing, you know. They really believe in doing research and investigating.

It sounds to me like you might have some ideas about this. I'd actually kind of like — what do you think? Because I feel like you have something on your mind.

[00:47:12]
Brian Mackey: I don't know. Well, you mentioned this, right? You read real news stories now about renaming military bases after obscure people who happen to share names with Civil War generals and things like that. And I feel like — I mean, that could have been an Onion story.

[00:47:26]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, I mean, I think that what's happening now is people are like, you can't tell the difference between the real news and The Onion anymore. And I think it's because people in the real world are now acting like people in Onion stories. And because —

[00:47:41]
Brian Mackey: Straight-faced lying, yeah.

[00:47:43]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, it's like straight-faced lying. And because of the way, you know, reporting works and the way — I don't know — like, it's so easy for bad actors to manipulate what comes out in the news. It's been a problem for a long time, but it's still a huge problem. And that's part of it, you know — things in real life are now sounding like Onion stories, and that's — I don't know — that —

[00:48:08]
Brian Mackey: And I guess — you asked my thought — we have just about a minute left, but the people who created The Onion cracked something about the way the media works and the codes and things like that. And I think that now we've seen people in power have cracked something about the way the media works. And, you know, the president can call up people and say something — "the war's coming to an end," for example, as he did earlier this week to a reporter — and the reporter publishes it, and the stock market goes up, and then it turns out that just wasn't true. And it's like, you know, you crack the code of the media. I don't know, there's something to that. Maybe that's an essay that needs to be written.

[00:48:45]
Christine Wentz: Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right on about that.

[00:48:48]
Brian Mackey: Christine Wentz is the author of Funny Because It's True, How The Onion [Created] Modern American News Satire. You can find it now wherever books are sold, from Running Press. Christine, thanks so much. I really enjoyed this.

Christine Wentz: Thank you for having me.

Brian Mackey: That's all the time we have today on the 21st show. Coming up tomorrow, author Ken Liu is best known for writing and translating speculative fiction. He's also a former software engineer and corporate lawyer. We'll talk with him about his life, his writing, and the promise and peril of our uncertain future.

We appreciate hearing from you about our programs and your suggestions for future guests or stories. Our email address is talk@twentyfirstshow.org. And you can find the email and every other way to contact us — voicemail, and so on — it's all at our website, twentyfirstshow.org. That's twentyfirstshow.org. We've got our past programs there, and you can find links to subscribe to our podcasts, or just look us up on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

The 21st show is produced by Christine Hatfield and Jose Zepeda. Our digital producer is Colum Kahn. Technical direction and engineering comes from Jason Croft and Steve Morck. Reginald Hardwick is our news director. The 21st show is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey. Thanks for listening.

---

**Flagged for Human Review:**

- [00:02:20] — The quote that begins "I'm sick and tired of listening to people who say..." is unclear in context. It appears to be a clip of a public figure speaking in connection with the Onion News Network "incomprehensible shouting" video, but the speaker and source are not identified. Human review recommended.
- [00:04:12] — The Latin motto transcript reads "2 stolts," which appears to be a low-confidence transcription of the Onion's actual Latin motto. The phrase has been lightly reformatted as "two words, it's Latin" to reflect the host's apparent description, but the original Latin text and its accurate rendering should be verified by a human editor.
- [00:08:38] — The age reference for early Onion staff was rendered in the original as "1920, 21 years old." This has been interpreted as "19, 20, 21 years old" and formatted accordingly. Human review recommended to confirm intent.
- [00:13:22] — The caller's sentence beginning "[It] passed around to quite a few people..." is grammatically incomplete in the original. The inferred subject "it" has been added in brackets, but human review is recommended.
- [00:25:57] — The caller identified as Max from Rockford is placed under Speaker 3, which was also used for the caller Tim from Franklin Grove and Paul from Carbondale. These may represent distinct individuals sharing a label in the original transcript. Human review recommended to confirm speaker identity and labeling.
- [00:26:42] — Corey refers to "early 80s days" in reference to The Onion. Given that The Onion was founded in 1988 and Corey identifies as a Gen X high schooler, this likely refers to the early 1990s. The text has been rendered as "early ['90s] days" with a bracketed correction. Human review recommended.
- [00:32:51] — The Car Talk clip includes Bosnian place names that are unclear in the original transcript and rendered as "[Zbbzvetsk]," "[Grzny]," "[Yandliia]," and "[Gloom]." These appear to be intentionally garbled or satirical stand-ins for Bosnian names and may be accurate as written; human review recommended to confirm.
- [00:36:53] — Speaker 6, Speaker 7, and Speaker 8 appear in video clip segments. Their identities are not established in the transcript. Labels have been retained as formatted speaker labels.
- [00:41:41] — The host refers to Ben Collins as "Tim Onion on Blue Sky." This has been rendered as "[@TimOnion] on Bluesky" based on contextual inference, but the correct account handle should be verified by a human editor.
- [00:43:54] — "Ben Carlin" in the original transcript may refer to Ben Karlin, a known former Onion editor and Daily Show head writer. The name has been rendered as "Ben Karlin" per contextual inference; human review recommended to confirm spelling.
- [00:43:54] — "Rich Dom" in the original transcript may refer to Rich Dahm, a known former Onion writer and Colbert Report producer. The name has been rendered as "Rich [Dahm]" with a bracketed inference; human review recommended to confirm spelling.
- [00:45:29] — "Brad rollin" in the original transcript is unclear. It has been rendered as "Brad [Rollen]" with a bracketed inference pending confirmation of the character name from the original Onion article.
- [00:48:48] — The host's closing reference to the book's subtitle was rendered in the original as "How The Onionred modern American news satire," which appears to be a transcript error for "How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire." The word "Created" has been added in brackets; human review recommended.
- [00:48:48] — "Running ress" in the original transcript appears to be a transcript error for "Running Press." The name has been rendered as written in other references throughout the transcript; human review recommended to confirm.
- Throughout — Several speaker segments originally attributed to spk_3 appear to represent different callers (Tim from Franklin Grove, Paul from Carbondale, and Max from Rockford). This labeling ambiguity has been preserved using the Speaker 3 label throughout, but human review is recommended to confirm whether these are distinct individuals who were mislabeled in the source transcript.