Entertainment
A Paper Where the News Really Is Fake, and That’s the Point
In “Funny Because It’s True,” Christine Wenc offers an idiosyncratic history of The Onion, the publication that made the media its chief satirical target.
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.
