On September 27, 2001, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a new issue following a brief hiatus due to the September 11th terrorist attacks. It was a precarious time in comedy, with many humorists having yet to return and guys like Letterman and Jon Stewart deciding to play it straight instead of crack a joke. But in their first issue back, The Onion did what it always did — it told jokes. With headlines like “Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake,” The Onion found the pitch-perfect way to approach humor in a very sensitive time. Now, nearly 20 years later, the issue is widely considered to be an important part of comedy history — even an important part of the broader cultural history surrounding 9/11.
While The Onion’s headquarters back in 2001 may have been in downtown Manhattan, to get the proper context for their landmark issue, the story doesn’t begin in New York. Instead, it begins in Madison, Wisconsin, where The Onion operated from 1988 until just a few months before the 9/11 attacks.
Founded in the late 1980s by University of Wisconsin students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, The Onion was born as a weekly humor print publication at their college campus. A year after its debut, Keck and Johnson sold the paper to humorist Scott Dikkers and publisher Peter Haise, who, over time, oversaw The Onion’s transformation into a more satirical form of comedy.
Robert Siegel, The Onion writer, 1994 to 2003; Editor in Chief, 1996 to 2003: The joke was always that The Onion was a bunch of Midwest slackers. It was very different from The National Lampoon, where there were all these ambitious East Coast people fighting to be the top guy. It wasn’t competitive like that. The profile of the typical Onion writer was that they were marginally employed and maybe they had completed their education at the University of Wisconsin. I guess I had a small modicum of ambition and that was enough to differentiate me to become the editor. Plus, no one else really wanted to be the editor.
It was more wacky and silly than it was satirical back then, more of a parody of The Weekly World News. The bite that it eventually had wasn’t really there in the beginning. I’m not trying to take credit for it, but during my time there, I saw it take on a more political point-of-view. The Onion didn’t start with any sort of agenda. It wasn’t started by people that were trying to say anything. It was really just started as something to put around all the pizza coupons. The people who started it wanted to have a newspaper and they knew they wanted to sell local advertising, and they just needed something to put around the local advertising and this silly, fake news format emerged.