Onion Nation

Todd Hanson: "No, I think it's got to be his hope chest, full of all the stuff he's been buying in anticipation of being first lady. He presses the dress to his decolletage, lets out a wistful sigh and carefully lays the box in among the fancy china he'd bought to entertain heads of state with. He'll have a pair of those white gloves with the buttons that women don't wear anymore and imagining all the heads of state he would have gotten to greet."

Seth Reiss (falsetto, pantomiming the wistful proffering of a regal hand): "Good afternoon, Mister Ambassador. How do you do?"

Dan Guterman: "While a grandfather clock ticked in the background, he carefully lowered a gramophone needle to a worn LP, held the dress and slowly danced around the room to the crackling strains of 'The Way We Were.' "

A wave of unrestrained laughter broke in the room. Editor Joe Randazzo gave a skeptical half turn of his head. "I just hope this works," he said.

The Onion, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, published its first issue in 1988 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was conceived by students Tim Keck and Chris Johnson, who were in their early 20s. The early days were so unremunerative that Keck and Johnson purportedly were often reduced to unhappy lunches of white bread topped with raw onions, a meal that inspired the paper's name. In 1989, Keck and Johnson sold the paper to Onion cartoonist Scott Dikkers, then 24, and publisher Peter Haise, 21, for $16,000. Tim Keck is now publisher of the Stranger, a Seattle weekly alternative paper. Johnson is an owner of NuCity Publications, which publishes the Weekly Alibi in Albuquerque.

Under Dikkers and Haise, the paper spread beyond Madison to a handful of cities: Milwaukee, Chicago, Boulder, Champaign-Urbana. Its climb to national prominence started in 1996, when the Onion's Web site launched.

"I remember thinking, 'This is nuts; no one's going to look at this thing on the computer,'" Joe Garden, then a contributor, said. "I thought the Web spoiled the whole concept of the Onion. I thought: It's a paper, a parody of an existing medium. That's what makes the jokes work."

But the Web site speedily went viral, and, in the meantime, the black-and-white print edition had undergone a full color renovation, with spoof schlock sidebars ("Infographics" and "Statshots," e.g., "What Are We Dipping Our Snack Foods In?"), refining its nose-thumbing at the McPaper design conventions of USA Today. Beyond its riffs on politics and pop culture, the Onion's distinctive voice coalesced in the journalistic chronicles of its workaday protagonists, the Area Man and Woman, whose small-caliber vicissitudes ("Area Man Forces Self To Drink Another Free Refill," "Area Man Expected To Work With These Incompetents") would ultimately build into an epic literature of American alienation writ small, and in arid AP-style prose.

By 1997, the Onion was at last in a position to pay salaries to its employees who, for the previous decade, had pretty much worked for free. At the start of the Onion's boom years in the late '90s, $25,000 was the standard wage for its writing staff. (The paper won't disclose current employee pay, except to say that its employees make less than television writers, who average solid six-figure salaries, but that they "aren't poor.") In 1999, the Onion found its way onto coffee tables nationwide with its bestselling "Our Dumb Century," a volume retrofitting history with 100 years of satiric reportage (August 15, 1945: "War Over! 50 Years of Nuclear Paranoia Begin Today"), and won a coveted Thurber Prize for humor in 1999, confirming its ascent from scampish campus broadsheet to American comedy institution.

In 2001, the paper, now bundled with the A.V. Club, a nonsatirical insert featuring a standard array of reviews and art-related doings, relocated to New York, to place itself in the nation's hub for both comedy and publishing. The Onion hadn't yet hit the newsstands in New York when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, a horror the writers found themselves in the unenviable position of having to turn into something Americans could chuckle at.

"At that first meeting, we were supposed to pitch jokes around the attacks, and here we weren't even established as New Yorkers," said Joe Garden. "It seemed way too soon, and just sort of inappropriate for us to make any kind of statement at all. I remember thinking, 'We're done. It's over.'"

But the paper went to press, with lead stories ranging from "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell," a piece some criticized as unimaginative pandering, to more elegiac and moving contemplations of the tragedy. "One of my favorite Onion stories -- 'Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake' -- came out of 9/11," said DiCenzo. "It wasn't a big newsy take on 9/11, but it totally captured what a lot of us were feeling."