Onion Nation

The Clinton/dress had barely escaped the editorial guillotine. A slim consensus had it that Hillary Clinton had already taken enough slugs in the primary contest and that a post-mortem ribbing about the candidate's loss might be beating a dead horse. There was also the point that a joke about the president in a dress felt sort of like warmed-over Benny Hill. "It just seems toothless," said Dan Guterman. "It's a joke about a man in drag."

"But it's not," said Megan Ganz. "It's a different story. It's more an emotional story -- it's about sad Bill. Just as Hillary had these deep emotional reasons for wanting to be president, Bill had deep emotional reasons for, you know, welcoming heads of state to the White House in a dress."

Mike DiCenzo, a quiet 24-year-old and the most tidily kempt of the staff's four bearded-Jesus avatars, agreed. "It's not so much as a man in drag as Bill Clinton wanting to be really elegant, to be the center of attention. It's about getting back to our crazy Clinton character," who in previous issues of the paper: wrote a fan letter to Joan Jett, poured out malt liquor in the Rose Garden for "dead homies" Ron Brown and Vince Foster, was molested by his visiting uncle, became a spokesman for Manwich, captured a Nazi submarine, Googled himself and used the power of his imagination to turn a bar of soap into a tugboat.

After a period of spirited debate, Guterman conceded that he was willing to get behind the headline provided that "the dress comes with a pillbox hat."

"And the pearls he planned to wear," said Seth Reiss.

With the headlines selected, and the issue's skeleton propped into place, the writers convened after lunch to brainstorm each story, to probe and test the jokes, and gestate their conceits into embryonic pieces of comic reportage. In committee, the Bill Clinton/first lady dress joke underwent a transformation from imperiled underdog to unlikely favorite. The process worked like this:

Todd Hanson: "Okay, so the joke is all about Bill Clinton wanting to be the first lady. So what we're satirizing is the foolishness of the role of the first lady."

Megan Ganz: "I don't think that it's the foolishness of the dream, so much as that he wants to be a Jackie O, a figurehead, a fashion icon. It's about the sadness of letting go of the dream, that he never got to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on the president's arm. We'll want to see him carefully folding the tissue paper over the dress and putting it on a high shelf."

Todd Hanson: "Do we talk about his dream of being the first male first lady?"

Dan Guterman: "I think it's funnier if we leave gender out of it entirely."

Megan Ganz: "It's like: 'It's such a lovely dress,' said Bill Clinton, the 62-year-old ex-president. I think you want to stick mostly to the sadness."

Joe Garden: "I feel a hope chest is in order. He'll put the dress in a hope chest for Chelsea."