Wisconsin's Onion Moves to the Bid Apple

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 | by Steve Miller

The staff at The Onion brings its Midwestern sensibilities to New York City, where the publication has moved after 12 years of lampooning our pup culture from Madison, Wis.

America's foremost newspaper lampoon, The Onion, has abandoned Madison, Wis., for upscale Chelsea in Manhattan, but the move will neither tame nor inflame the staff. The scribes promise that the attendant pay increase won't keep them from their mission: to catch the wry in pop culture, or as they put it, to write like George Carlin in grade school.

"We're still geeks, and we always will be," says Todd Hanson, head writer for the 12-year-old publication, which started in 1988 as an alternative newspaper for students at the University of Wisconsin. "Coming here is just a chance for us to be someplace where there is more comedy like ours, more alternative comedy. But we won't be selling out or going mainstream. I doubt that Winona Ryder will want to go out with me."

The staff's childlike fascination with the machinations of the world gives The Onion a fresh perspective, which is boundless in its willingness to discuss any issue. "We aren't big newshounds around here," says editor-in-chief Rob Siegel, a Long Island native who has spent the last six years in Madison. "The only reading we do is People magazine and maybe USA Today, the more lowbrow stuff. You won't find us reading the Economist or Nation."

Currently, The Onion is distributed in Milwaukee, Chicago, Denver and Madison, for a combined circulation of around 200,000. New editions are planned for New York this summer and for San Francisco next year. The Onion.com Website also gets about 1 million visitors a month.

"We're not gonna have some ultrahip humor all of a sudden" says writer Chris Karwowski, who joined The Onion eight months ago. His leap to the publication was typical: Before the move, he was working at a sandwich shop down the street from The Onion headquarters in Madison.

Hanson and Karwowski, like most of the eight-member staff, have Midwestern roots, a late-1960s, early1970s birth date, and a Greenpeacecum-Granola style -- longish hair, well-worn clothes and a smart irreverence spiked with irony. Hanson was a college dropout and dishwasher before he became a paid staffer for The Onion in 1997.

An Onion news meeting is similar to that of any other well-trained, professional comedy unit. Cracking jokes is interrupted with ideas and one-liners. A reply to one headline idea: "That's so stupid, that's good." A concept for a new addition to the stable of traditional philosophers, albeit a generation X one: "The great philosopher, Mediocrates."

Out of the meetings spring the stories that tickle and tantalize: "Drug dealer outraged by racial profiling" ... "Psychiatrist cures patient" ... "Control freak wishes she had more free time." The world according to The Onion is acerbic and iconoclastic, in which everything is fair game to be mocked, and nothing is sacred.

The troupe still is completing its move, and it shows. The Onion quarters has plenty of sawdust on its newly finished hardwood floor. Furniture consists of a pingpong table and Foosball game, the latter compliments of Crown Publishing, which released Our Dumb Century, a book of satirical front pages written by staffers at The Onion that was a New York Times best seller in 1999.

Our Dumb Century is one of two best-selling books by writers at The Onion, and the group plans a third book. Meanwhile, they are contemplating Hollywood: Two movie deals are in the works, tentatively titled Canadian Girlfriend Unsubstantiated and 10th Circle Added to Rapidly Expanding Hell.

Miramax bought "first-look" rights from The Onion, meaning it may choose to develop other story ideas and make them into films.

"It's still in the cocktail-party stage," says Siegel, referring to a Miramax bash recently held in their honor. Not that they know what to do at these big city soirdes. "We're awkward. We stand in the corner by ourselves," says Siegel.