Christine Wenc was an original staffer at The Onion from its inception in 1988 until 1990, and recently she decided to revisit that time by writing “Funny Because it’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire”. She delves into the history of the publication from its earliest conceptions to its modern media empire. Through interviews with its key members throughout the decades, Wenc paints a picture of The Onion by the people who have crafted it.
UWM Post recently got a chance to sit down and talk to Wenc about the book in preparation for her talk with Matt Wild of the Milwaukee Record at Boswell Book Store on Thursday, March 20.
Casmir Byrne: So, to start off by talking a bit about the writing process of the book, what inspired you to write “Funny Because it’s True?”
Christine Wenc: Well, I moved back to Madison after being on the East Coast for like 20 to 25 years in 2017, which was the beginning of the first Trump administration. That’s when everybody was talking really intensely about fake news. And so, I’m back home, back in my college town, I’m like, “Huh? Wow, I wonder what The Onion people think about all of this, right?” So that set me on this path and I started talking to people and googling around. That’s when discovered that there was actually a lot of information online about The Onion’s early history and there were other parts of it that were actually not accurate at all, and I was like, “wait a second, that’s not right!” So, it was sort of both of those things, I was really interested in what was happening in media news at the time and the Onion’s sort of response to it. You know, satire is critical thinking, and I was really curious about that. I was on the original staff of the Onion as a student, my roommate started it, so I was just thinking about all that kind of stuff.
Casmir Byrne: The first few chapters about the early days of The Onion read as very nostalgic. Would you say that was the case when writing the book?
Christine Wenc: Yeah, that was part of it, but then also I’m trained as a historian, but I also have a background in public journalism and alternative media. I kind of brought all those things together to write the history of The Onion, which was really interesting to me, because there were actually tons of things about The Onion’s story that I knew absolutely nothing about when I started this project. I had stopped reading it a while back and just hadn’t really been paying attention. So, there was a process of discovery that kind of motivated me through the whole book. I also wanted to kind of tell the history of news and media since the 80s; since the Onion’s been satirizing and parodying it since then. You have to really understand something if you’re going to satirize it, right? They’ve gotten really good at replicating the feel and tropes and structure of the real thing, for a really long time. So, I was like, “Oh, this is also an opportunity to tell the history of what’s been going on in media since the 80s also.”
Casmir Byrne: Getting into the meat of the book, chapter one opens with you talking about this concept of the trickster archetype which I was fascinated by, and I was wondering where that kind of came from. Did you see yourselves as tricksters at the time or was it a metaphor you found when going back and reexamining it?
Christine Wenc: Yeah, that comes out of this Jungian dream interpretation group I’ve been in since the pandemic with Martha Crawford, who’s the psychotherapist that I quote there. During that process we talk about archetypes a lot. I can be a very neck up person, and I can be a very analytical and super logical person. So it’s really interesting and actually super helpful just as a human being for me to like, “let’s look into the other stuff too.” I also then read “Trickster Makes This World” by Lewis Hyde which focuses on that archetype, and I just kind of felt like there’s forces and things moving around in the world all the time, but specifically a lot now. Things you can’t necessarily go at logically, you know, going at them archetypically or with things like humor, or poetry. That’s a really good way to connect with that stuff, because other approaches don’t really seem to be working so well right now.
Casmir Byrne: In the chapter you talk about the trickster as a force of good, something that is ultimately kind of whimsical and pushes boundaries, whereas in fake or false news you see a more malicious aspect of the trickster.
Christine Wenc: Yeah, sometimes you can’t really tell like which way it’s going to go, and there are a lot of different forces impacting it. The retired UW (University of Wisconsin) professor I interviewed about it was like “It’s the light of the sun but it can also scorch”. It can go a lot of different directions, and you can’t necessarily control it.
Casmir Byrne: Also in those first few chapters, you give a picture of the early Onion staff, and I got the sense that in the early days there was a strong counter-cultural or anti-establishment streak. Do you think that impacted The Onion and its success?
Christine Wenc: Yeah, I’m sure it did but people always love the silly stuff you know. The silly part is almost like the gateway drug into the other stuff. In the book I talk about how people sort of argued over, “is The Onion political, is it not political, if it is in what way.” I know some of the folks there that have been my friends for a long time like Todd Hanson in particular, he was a very prominent part of The Onion. I know that he felt very strongly that like this was almost his form of activism; it was his way of trying to do some good in the world. There was definitely a sort of independent, DIY counterculture in Madison that was really strong at that time. Everyone I knew was in that or adjacent to it; there was a really strong music scene, there was all kinds of weird art and stuff happening. That just was my life at the time, so yeah.
Casmir Byrne: In the book you also mention that the name “The Onion” is totally spontaneous and was chosen at random. Have you in your research, or time at The Onion, heard any crazy myths about what the name means or stories about where it came from?
Christine Wenc: Yeah, that’s one of the things I discovered when I was initially googling. I heard people saying, “oh, an onion is a name for a juicy news story.” I was just like, “What? I’ve never heard that. Where does that come from?” There are a lot of jokers at The Onion, you know, so it’s totally possible that somebody just said that at some point; knowing they were just making it up. It was very funny when I was going back and reading all these old news stories about the onion from the 90s and the 2000s; every single one started with, “The Onion peels back the layers.” That was the metaphor they use every single time. Even my editor for this book wanted to put it on the dust jacket, and I was like, “No, you can’t put that on the cover!” It is a total cliche that every single person who’s ever written a story about The Onion used. But yeah, there is no mythology behind it. Any story you hear about why it’s called The Onion is one that somebody just made up; the name is just random.
Casmir Byrne: And then two questions that go hand in hand; first, where there any cool stories that you found or remember from your time there that you wanted to include in the book, but had to cut.
Christine Wenc: Oh God, there was just billions of them. I mean, in my original manuscript was like 2 1/2 times as long as what I was supposed to write. That’s kind of how I write, I just sort of expect to write two or three times as much as I should. Yeah, there were lots of them. I’d have to sit around and think of a good one, but yeah.
Casmir Byrne: And then in your research, or again at your time there, were there any articles that were funny, or you guys got attached too, but never got published?
Christine Wenc: The Onion’s writing process inherently weeds out like tons of stories. It’s probably out of around 100 headlines; they published two of them when I was there. It was early on; there was a lot of making stuff up at like two in the Morning before going to the printer three hours later. There was a “This American Life” episode about an Onion writer named Megan Gans, who I was never able to reach to interview for the book. But in that piece, she throws out a headline that wasn’t used, but I think it should have been used and it’s “Spork used as knife,” which I was like, “That’s really good, they should have used that!” The chapters used to have titles, and I really wanted to call one “Spork used as knife” before we switched to numbers. So just a shout out to a headline by Megan Gans, who’s now a TV writer.
Casmir Byrne: And then to wrap up, you just wrote this book about the history of The Onion, and you have worked on a few different public history projects. I get a sense that history, and documenting history, is a focus for you. Do you plan to continue writing in this vein?
Christine Wenc: Oh yeah, I have tons of ideas for projects. I actually just got a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the next project, which has absolutely nothing to do with comedy. When I went through grad school, I did history of science and history of medicine. and its is related to that. The working title is “How Life Support Technology Changed American Deaths,” so I’m sort of going from comedy to tragedy. We’ll see what happens with that, but I’ve got other ideas. I’ve been writing forever, I just kind of took a kind of detour from publishing for a long time, doing other stuff. Now I’m sort of back to writing.
Boswell Books will be hosting a talk with Christine Wenc and Matt Wild of the Milwaukee Record at Boswell Book Store on Thursday, March 20.