Christine Wenc
speaker
27 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Christine Wenc’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Excerpt · "Funny Because It's True" - New book reveals the beginnings of The Onion · 20 Apr 2025
podcast
That is a good question. The Onion's mission is to try to make the world a better place with its satire. And the point of satire is to kind of point out what the writers think is wrong and needs to be changed. And there's a lot of thought that the Onion writers put into, you know, what they decide to target as their satire. So I think that's definitely part of it.
I would like to think that it has. I mean, the popularity of The Onion, what I would hope is some evidence of that. I mean, it was amazing to me that after nearly 40 years, The Onion is still popular. They were the first entity, I think, to reach a million followers on Blue Sky. And that headline in particular, I think, has made a big impact. It's been reported in the media multiple times.
Even in the course of me writing the book, I had to update the number of times that it's been reprinted. I think right now it's at about 37 or 38. And, you know, it just points out the kind of ineffectualness of the public response to, you know, this serious societal problem and pointing out that we are the only country in which this is a problem. continuing issue.
So if they're raising awareness of that, I think that's a really good thing.
Well, you'd have to talk to them now. But I think, you know, I think the Onion, I mean, they have stepped over the line a few times. I won't. I think that's true. But I do think that they're on the side of area men and area women. You know, they're on the side of the people who are affected by the decisions made by people in power. And I think that as long as they're
Focused on that as the place where they're coming from and where their proper target should be, I think that gives them a decent ethical standing in most cases, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I think people have asked me, you know, if The Onion could be, you know, become what it was. And I think that the competition now is so intense. There's just so much more than there was in the 80s and 90s even. So, yeah, breaking through all that, I think, is really difficult. So, yeah, when they started as paper, you know, they got a really strong local following.
And then they were kind of people were subscribing to The Onion from all across the country. And then when they went online in 96, that's what really made them take off. So there is almost an irony in the history of The Onion because the Internet is what made them famous.
But the Internet is also sort of what caused a lot of traditional media, including, you know, The Onion in a way, a lot of problems later on down the line.
Well, my understanding is that the reception of that issue was extremely positive. They received thousands and thousands of emails and faxes. That's when people sent faxes praising the issue and telling The Onion that it really helped a lot of people laugh for the first time because it came out just two weeks after the attack.
So I know the comedy community also held them in extremely high regard after that issue came out.
Oh, there's so, so many. There's been thousands and thousands of headlines. I have a penchant for the science and the kind of silly ones. One I always liked is archaeologists. Archaeological dig uncovers ancient race of skeleton people, which you have to sort of think about it for a minute. There's a lot of good archaeology ones.
But there are many, many funny and interesting and actually kind of sometimes sort of complicated and sad stories about people finding onion articles to be true, you know, thinking that it was real, which often happens when stories are kind of taken out of their context and seen in a different way. In the new context, sometimes it's hard to tell whether things are real or not.
And so I think many, many people have been fooled by The Onion for sure.
I was there early on when the staff was a bunch of 18 to 20-year-old undergraduate students, you know, working out of a dumpy student apartment on campus. And, you know, a lot of the paper was basically made up at, you know, 2 o'clock in the morning before it had to go to the printer a few hours later. But, you know, there was a lot of...
Being in a creative environment with a bunch of young people is very fun. There's all kinds of crazy, silly things happening all the time. That was gone by about the early 90s. But the 1990s staff, that was the group that really took The Onion to the next level, I think. They're the ones that made The Onion into a parody of USA Today, as people thought about it at the time. The newspaper, that is.
A number of them became committed to satirizing from a Probably a progressive point of view, I would say. That became really important. That's when they also started really adhering to AP style. And they were the people that really created the Onion's sort of mature voice, if you could call it mature, in that period of time. So that was an amazing group of people.
And a lot of those people are pictured on the front of the book, actually.
Yeah, that was very, I thought I definitely laughed when I saw that I was, that I'd been, oh, wow, it's USA Today. Do they know about the whole thing?
Yeah, no, it's been so interesting to see how, you know, because part of what I did with the book is tell the story of media and the news since the 80s, as well as the history of The Onion, because The Onion has been satirizing and making fun of flaws and, and, I would say, in mainstream media, you know, since that time in a lot of different ways.
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