“Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid.” “World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent.” “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years.”
There’s no mistaking an Onion headline; these are classics. Except, of course, for those moments when reality decides to cosplay them a little too well.
At this point, The Onion has become such a cultural touchstone that we often compare real life to The Onion, not the other way around.
So how did this satirical powerhouse earn its place as the ultimate benchmark for absurdity? How did a media outlet named after a layered vegetable end up producing one-liners everyone recognizes instantly?
Given how on-point they are with modern humor, you might assume The Onion popped up in the early 2000s.
But the story actually begins in 1988, when University of Wisconsin–Madison students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson decided to launch a weekly print newspaper for satirical news—yes, The Onion.
Keck had a newsroom pedigree: both his parents worked for The Hammond Times, and he’d already teamed up with cartoonist James Sturm to sell monthly calendars featuring Daily Cardinal comic characters.
The idea for a full-on satirical paper came from The Daily Cardinal’s annual April Fools’ parody issue.
As for the name? The stories vary.
Keck says it came from eating a lot of onion sandwiches. Early contributor Scott Dikkers claims it was “newspaper slang in the 1930s for a juicy, multi-layered story.” Editor Cole Bolton insists it was poking fun at a nearby campus bulletin called The Union.
Take your pick, it’s all delightfully ridiculous.
By 1989, Keck and Johnson sold the paper to Dikkers, along with advertising manager Peter Haise and typesetter Jonnie Wilder, for $16,000.
Dikkers went on to serve as The Onion’s longest-running editor-in-chief, from 1988–1999 and again from 2005–2008.
Over time, the writers realized traditional news practically begged to be parodied, with its stiff language, rigid tone, and a self-seriousness that made jokes land even harder.
Dikkers summed it up best: “In a world that seems to make less and less sense, as time goes on, it made sense that the ‘newspaper of record’ should also not make sense.”
The Onion, he explained, was born to publish “fake articles, fake reports, and overall outright, damnable lies” because, in a “post-truth world,” fake news sometimes feels like the only thing that makes sense.
