#92 Scott Dikkers Peels Back The Onion

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Jeff Dwoskin 0:16

All right, Jay, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. He got the show going each and every week and this week was no exception. Welcome, everybody, to Episode 92 of live from Detroit, the Jeff Dwoskin show. As always, I am your host, Jeff Dwoskin. Great to have you back for an entire new year of episodes. That's right, everybody. Welcome to 2022 Hope the New Year is trading well so far. I know. We're just a few days into it. But thanks for spending it with me. We've got a great show to kick off the new year. Scott Dikkers is here. That's right. Scott Dikkers the founding editor of the onion. That's right. The Onion. We all love The Onion. Scott was The Onion's longest serving Editor in Chief. And he's got a million stories to share with us about the creation of the onion lawsuits that they avoided so many great insights. It's so fun. Scott is also a comedy writer, speaker and entrepreneur, and we talk about his how to write funny series and how you can take advantage of that as well. And that's coming up and just a few minutes. I do hope you had an amazing New Year's Eve celebration doing whatever you enjoy doing. We just chilled at the house and binge watch some TV shows stuff that I'll probably be talking about on a future episode of crossing the streams. I hope you enjoyed last week's interview episode 90 with Richard Karn. He shared so many cool stories from family feud and home improvements. And a great story about his very own death hoax. Definitely double back and check that one out. If you haven't heard it yet. December was chock full of amazing interviews Richard Karn and Billy Van Zandt talking about the 40th anniversary of TAPS, Dee Wallace and Nicholas Hammond. And of course, all the bonus episodes on Thursday that call some of the greatest moments from our live show crossing the streams now brought to you in podcast form on Thursdays Good luck life be any better, I don't think so. 2022 is already shaping up to be the best year ever. And now it's time for the social media to

Alright, well, it's the new year. So let's do a New Year's Eve themed tip. Get out your pencils, write down every social media platform you're active in, write down every social media platform you want to be active in, and then commit the days that you're going to post on those platforms with new and original material engaging and platforms can include original material and reply and engaging with people on their posts. It's about giving and getting on social media. So don't just think about as you pushing out your content, and think about it as laying the groundwork to create something engaging with your fans. So let's just pick one platform, let's say Instagram, say okay, we're gonna post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then stick to that schedule. That way people expect posts to show up at that time. You can add to it, you can do stories on top of that, you can do reels on top of that, but have a kind of a base cadence and then do that for every platform. And then just stick to it throughout the you'll be better for it. You'll thank me your fans. Thank you. And that's the social media tip.

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All right. As I said earlier, please support all the sponsors. That is the best way you can help the show grow that and tell all your friends and family about the show and tell them to subscribe and follow and all that kind of stuff and don't stop mentioning it and They do. In the meantime, I think it's time for me to share my interview with Scott Dikkers with you. founding editor, the onion. He's got tales to tell. Enjoy.

Oh, all right, everybody. I'm excited to introduce you to my next guest comedy writer, speaker, entrepreneur, New York Times bestseller founding editor of the onion. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show Scott Dikkers, Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Dikkers 5:26

Hello, Jeff. And thank you. Oh, it's

Jeff Dwoskin 5:28

great to have you. Great to be here. Awesome. Awesome. I thought it might be a good kind of baseline. Before we get into any specifics on the onion, or comedy writing and all that kind of stuff to sort of baseline the difference between fake news and parody?

Scott Dikkers 5:45

Sure. Fake news is a format that comedy often takes nowadays, largely thanks to the onion, though it was in the culture before on things like Weekend Update, not necessarily the news, so on and so forth. parody is when you adopt the format of some other form of entertainment or information and use that as a delivery medium for comedy. So you can do a parody of a fortune cookie, you can do a parody of a movie, you can do a parody of anything. You can even do a parody of a newspaper, which is what how the onion got started. So Fake news is in that definition, a type of parody. But parody encompasses all other sorts of parody as well, like any Parody Tv show or movie a skit on SNL, you know, anything that mimics another format.

Jeff Dwoskin 6:36

Politically, it's taken on a different kind of definition as well,

Scott Dikkers 6:40

politically, it has taken on the meaning of propaganda, just flat on propaganda. And, you know, I do have to hand this to Trump when he says, you know, oh, that's the fake news. Obviously, he's only saying that when he disagrees with what the news is saying about him, but I don't believe the mainstream news media, it's all fake news. It's all corporate funded, propaganda that's there to prop up the corporate state and our corporate overlords that rule us and it's their to squash any kind of political opinion or movement that might limit their power, reduce their taxes, or change our system fundamentally, so that they can't buy and own congress people as they currently do.

Jeff Dwoskin 7:23

Alright, a little deeper than I thought, we're gonna go, we're happy to help. It's funny. And we can get into this as as we kind of talk, but they the lines start crossing not not the lines were like the onions crossing the line where people can't tell the difference.

Scott Dikkers 7:38

Yeah, no, I hear what you're saying. So, you know, people have often said to me over the years, like, the onion is the only news source I trust. And it's kind of a joke, you know, when they're saying it, but they also mean it because the onion is written by a lot of people with no agenda, just sort of like angst ridden, intelligent, angry, regular people who have a soapbox who are telling you what they think about the world, they're obviously communicating it to you in subtext, but you know, they have thoughts about what it's like to be a human being and what it's like to be in the world and what they really think about what's happening politically or culturally, socially, whatever. Whereas with the mainstream media, you're not getting that like you're getting tools of corporations telling you what the corporation wants you to think anybody you know, name any newscaster who gets paid millions and millions of dollars, you know, they're in that seat, because they're saying what the corporation's want them to say. And as soon as they stop saying what the corporation's want them to say they're gone. So the onion isn't like that the onion is has always been small, privately owned, the writers are very insulated from any kind of money or politics going on with the organization. So they just get to say whatever they think, and people really do appreciate that

Jeff Dwoskin 8:53

is nice. It's the every person's paper, it is hard to watch the news lately, even if, like, if I'm an MSNBC person, I still recognize it's a very skewed point of view. You know, I mean, I'm aware of that. I don't know that everyone who watches the news is aware of that. Well, they're not that,

Scott Dikkers 9:11

you know, propaganda is so powerful and so effective. There's a reason why they spend millions and millions of dollars on it, you know, and there's a reason why Rupert Murdoch, some millions into Fox News before it ever turned a profit because when you're the propagandists, like you determine the conversation, you set the course for the country, you know, people just believe it. And you see now obviously, like, if there was ever any doubt how gullible people are and how stupid people are, and how just They'll swallow anything that's given to them. All those doubts are gone. Now. We've seen that people will literally die before though, investigate a fact and make sure it's true. You know, before they leap. It's shocking.

Jeff Dwoskin 9:53

It's shocking. It's sad, very sad. It's disturbing to kind of live through it and watch it and

Scott Dikkers 9:59

yeah, you It makes me I grew up thinking that the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment were these great things that happened. And now we're on a new course where science and rational thinking rule the day and oh my god, I'm so glad we're out of the dark ages. No, we're the we have the same brain, evolutionarily speaking, as we did during the Dark Ages. And we could easily slip back into that. And you can see the workings of that right now how someone who has a cult like following can just tell people to do something like remember Jim Jones back in the 70s. I remember thinking that was crazy that all those people would drink the Kool Aid and killed themselves willingly and knowingly. I totally buy that now I can totally see people doing that. I mean, they are doing it. They're refusing to take the vaccine, they're dying in scores. So it's really terribly, terribly sad. But that's why you want to be associated with something like the onion because then at least you're laughing at least you're trying to find the humor. And what else can you do? Like you have? You have to otherwise you would just be depressed?

Jeff Dwoskin 11:01

It's true. And I think so many people get their news, not only from the onion, but also Saturday Night Live, right? A lot of people are aware of certain things because of that, and The Daily Show, and more. So with Jon Stewart, you know, I don't know about now. But all those sources, because I think that's people can take it, it's less. Yeah,

Scott Dikkers 11:22

it goes down a little easier. Yeah, yeah. And they can even tell the harsher stories. We all learned that in the comedy business from Mark Twain because he was the master of delivering really hard truths in a spoonful of jelly, you know, and it just go down. So easy. And that's what the best satirise to. So they can even talk about human extinction and climate change and all that sort of stuff in a way that the mainstream media simply cannot. They're sponsored by fossil fuel companies, they will never address those issues and talk about them in a serious way.

Jeff Dwoskin 11:53

So speaking of the path to humor to brighten up the world in terms of how people get their news, yes. How does a young Scott Decker's find his path, realize I'm funny, and this has to be my life?

Scott Dikkers 12:07

Well, I'm sure it's very similar to a lot of other people in comedy. Before I ever was funny, I thought I was funny. And I enjoyed trying to be funny. And so I made little drawings and books and jokes for my grandma. And she laughed at them. And that made me feel loved and accepted. And so I did more of that. And when you do that your whole life and you become a class clown, and you draw a comic strip for your high school newspaper. And these become part of your identity and part of how you find meaning in life, largely, probably, because even though at that age, maybe you're not aware of all the horror in the world, and just how completely doomed we are. You do turn to comedy as kind of a way to cope and a way to just get along and have a nice life, even though you're heading straight long into hell in a handbasket. That's a very typical story. Like you hear that from a lot of people in comedy. When I got out of high school, I was faced with the reality, okay, how am I going to make a living? How am I going to actually do this for a job. And so that's when the real challenge began for me. And I tried a bunch of different things. And what I decided to ultimately focus on was comic strips because they were the cheapest, easiest thing you could do. I had grand visions of making movies and all this other stuff. But I started drawing comic strips and I would send them out, you know, try to get them published. And I for years, I did that unsuccessfully. But I was so into this, and I had no other path that I just was relentless. And I just kept doing it. And eventually, you know, I got some comic strips published and then I came up with a comic strip that became really popular, I was able to make a living as a comic strip artist. Jim's journal. Yeah, that was Jim's journal. Most people have long forgotten about that. So I appreciate that. You actually read up on that.

Jeff Dwoskin 13:56

I think I had a one of those books. Oh, this is wonderful. I remember seeing you speak at a digital Summit. Oh, cool. Cool. You put it up and I'm like, I had that book. And for the life of me. I've been looking I was the one that where it goes to college. It was okay. Yeah,

Scott Dikkers 14:09

no, it was a New York Times bestselling book. It was my first best seller. Anyway. So aside from that, I also was going into performing I was doing a lot of voice work for commercials and cartoons. So that was kind of another sideline I had that was, you know, comedy business related. I was mostly doing comedy impressions and other types of character voices and stuff. I was just really ambitious and I really wanted to do everything. And when I met these two guys who started up the onion, I was entranced and I loved the idea of starting a humor publication and they you know, considered me like a cool if they could get me in there on their team, because I was like an established success in comedy in our little tiny pond of Madison, Wisconsin at the time, and so I just jumped in with them. unreservedly jumped right in and It was about a year later, they ended up selling it to me and two other people, one of whom we ultimately bought out. Yeah, that's kind of how it really fell in my lap. And I do credit those two guys, Tim Keck and Chris Johnson for naming the onion. I mean, I was part of those conversations, but it was their baby, you know, it was their company. And Tim came from a newspaper family. And he really understood newspaper parody and totally inherited that from him. So when they left, it was just a matter of, okay, we got to do this. And we got to put together a staff and we got to try to make it funny. And then over the years, we just kept trying to make it funnier, until we sort of zeroed in on that really strict AP style that the onion is known for today.

Jeff Dwoskin 15:40

When Tim and Chris named at the onion. Was there anything specific behind it and layers? So there's that?

Scott Dikkers 15:45

Yeah, it was originally going to be called the rag. And I was like, okay, but it didn't really sit well with anybody. It just started to feel a little crude. Pretty sure it was Chris's uncle who noted that Chris would eat raw onion on a piece of untoasted white bread for breakfast every morning. And he visited one time and he's like, why don't you call it the onion. And Tim and I love that idea. Because we did have to print it on newsprint because it was the cheapest way to print anything. There's only thing we could afford. And an onion did seem like you peel back the layers to get it the facts of the story seemed like a great name for a newspaper.

Jeff Dwoskin 16:23

That is a great name. And it's nice to hear that someone else have I never ate raw onion as a sandwich. It was common in my household to eat or can a tuna fish, a raw onion, almost like an apple. And then like we have cut up some celery and stuff like that.

Scott Dikkers 16:39

I've always been eternally fascinated by that story, where they used to go to theaters and they'd have like a hypnotist, talk about apples and show a lot of apples and then have someone blindfolded take a bite of an onion. And then the person thinks it's an apple, like they really taste an apple personally could never be too raw. It's too much for me. I cook mine.

Jeff Dwoskin 17:03

I love raw onion. So I'm gonna I'll give him a call and I will talk raw onion. Anyway. Okay, so that's cool. So they sell it to you. I read for around, you know, you can neither confirm nor deny around $16,000 to you and your pals. The

Scott Dikkers 17:17

sale price of the onion was $16,400 610. So, okay, my two partners and I had to come up with three grand each as like a down payment on that 16,400 And that was a lot of money for me, like I'm maybe 2324 or something like that. And that's a lot of money. $3,000

Jeff Dwoskin 17:38

But your gym journal rich at this point.

Scott Dikkers 17:40

I'm Jim's journal Rich, I do have some savings. But it was everything I had. That was everything I had, but it was a gamble. But I I really never doubted it. Like I loved doing it and believed that it had a future. And I don't know, there's certain wisdom in that raw confidence of youth when you just make the leap. I miss those days. Everything now is over thought,

Jeff Dwoskin 18:01

Well, that's true. That's your when you bought the onion, what was the State of the Union at the at that time in terms of where it was? To where we know it is now I know it was just the infancy but I mean,

Scott Dikkers 18:13

it was in its infancy, it had a circulation of about 15,000. It was only in Madison, Wisconsin, it barely broke even issue to issue like selling local advertising. There were coupons on the front page that you clipped out. And a lot of readers thought those were fake. A lot of I drew a lot of cartoons for the newspaper and sometimes helped write articles and come up with headlines and stuff. And it was around eight pages, usually sometimes 12. So that's like two broadsheets folded for eight pages, the smallest publication, at least among the smallest in the Madison area, there were there was like the LGBTQ weekly that was probably a higher circulation. There was like other little magazines like that there might have been like a black newspaper that was higher circulated and the two campus newspapers had far greater circulation, the daily cardinal and the Badger Herald. So it was a very insignificant College Humor newspaper when I bought it. So that was a lot of money. But you know, $16,400, but it was like a business that you could scale like it was making money, and it was paying for itself. And we love doing it. So it was kind of a no brainer.

Jeff Dwoskin 19:21

Were there people in your circle inner circle that told you not to do it?

Scott Dikkers 19:25

Yes, my good friend Jay, at the time was like, Why? Why are you doing this? Why don't you start your own, like, you don't need to buy their thing. But I understood the value of even one year of goodwill, the brand name. And I knew the foundation that Tim and Chris had laid and all the ad sales that they had done and stuff, and it was worth it to me, especially since it would have cost me a lot more than $3,000 to just start from the ground up. It's so funny because I was talking to Jay the other day and he's like, Yeah, I still think you should have started.

Jeff Dwoskin 19:56

He told me his ground on that one. Okay,

Scott Dikkers 19:58

yeah. He will never change Just mind about that probably.

Jeff Dwoskin 20:01

That's funny. Okay, so now you're all in on the onion.

Scott Dikkers 20:06

I'm all in. And I'm literally spending every waking moment at the onion office. And it does move from Tim and Chris's flat to a basement office. So we're renting an office. So that's a whole new expense, rent on an office. But I'm there every hour of the day and working very late into the night most nights, and I'm doing everything at first I'm taking the photos, writing the stories, developing the photos, you know, there's no Photoshop, it's not digital. So I literally had to take a class on how to develop photos. And it was a miracle that we ever got anything to work and paste it up in time to drive to the printer

Jeff Dwoskin 20:42

back in those decades ago, we used to do like little newsletters for our fraternity, you'd have to tape it up on a piece of paper, you print stuff out, you save it all together, go to Kinkos Xerox it as a single thing.

Scott Dikkers 20:55

Yeah. And we were, you know, we used Kinkos a lot. And because we had an apple lunchbox computer, and you could take the disk to Kinkos and print out the ad or the story or whatever. But then you had to cut it out and paste it on this big haystack board that you would get from the printer. And then you would drive to you know, a real newspaper printer that would actually have a printing press to print. And it's so funny, we used to have this saying on our wall, we were so smug about it, it said freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. And that's a famous quote from somebody like Benjamin Franklin or somebody like that. And it was so funny, because we kept losing our printing press, because they'd be like, there's too many squares for us. We don't want to print your paper anymore. Or it's one too many pictures of a penis for us, we're gonna have to bail on this job. And for time, we had a really hard time we had to drive like two or three hours out of town to find a printer who could print the onion. And we realize the true meaning of that phrase. It's not the person who owns the newspaper, it's the person who owns the printing press itself is free.

Jeff Dwoskin 21:56

So in the olden days, swears and penises almost added the onion. Yeah, that's funny. All right. So would you say the anatomy of those types of articles you're putting out there are the same as is they are similar now? Killer? No? Different.

Scott Dikkers 22:13

Sorry, yeah, basic anatomy. Yes, funny headline. And then you try to make make a funny story. And you try to make it get funnier as you go along, which is kind of an inverse pyramid from how comedy had been written prior to that, prior to that comedy would be written like this, you'd write a story or you design a story to a writer. And it would be kind of weird and funny, and then it would build to some sort of punch at the end. And then after that, you would slap some sort of headline on it, that would be intriguing enough for someone to want to maybe read the article. And I always thought that was completely backwards, so much better to have a funny headline. And then you're sort of Welcome to the red carpet into the article, because that funny headline just escalates until the end, where it's just gets funnier and funnier. And I got all that from this wonderful book that I got, it was just a mind changing book called information anxiety. It's a big bestseller in the early 90s. And it was all about how people digest information. They like a big headline. And they then they like a sub headline, and then they like a picture caption. And then if they want more detail, they can read the small print before that book, like people didn't really understand that intuitively. The guy who wrote the book designed airport signage to help people get to their gate. And he designed manuals for VHS machines and stuff, which at the time, and still today, you see this, unfortunately, you open an instruction manual for some kind of electronic and it's all fine print, there's no headlines, there's no simple numbers in circles, the steps of how to do things. And he was all about that make it simple. In all told it can be as complicated as you want. But make sure that entry is really just lowest common denominator. So everybody gets the headline, everybody gets that joke. And then maybe as you dig deeper, you can have more intelligent jokes or jokes that require a little more background or knowledge about the subject or whatever. So that book really affected me and really helped me hone what Tonya had been doing because we were doing a lot of silly stuff. And we were also writing a wacky column and then slapping a headline on it. The whole thing of doing headlines first came from that book information anxiety.

Jeff Dwoskin 24:21

We definitely have the best headlines in town. I think everyone has a friend My friend is at Valentine who he calls the best one so you know when it shows up on his feet best fine. You know, some of the best aggregators out there. Best aggregator out there. Yes.

Scott Dikkers 24:37

But you know, the trick to the onion headline is volume. The more headlines you write, the better your chances nailing a really really good one. So the onion has always produced as many headlines as possible in a given week to go through and select the best ones. The

Jeff Dwoskin 24:51

what is the anatomy of kind of putting together an issue of the union is it everyone come to the table with tons of ideas is Like a writers room for a TV where you just see

Scott Dikkers 25:02

Exactly, yep, that's how it's always been. And every writer usually has 2025 ideas. And there's a larger pool of freelancers who also submit 2025 ideas. So you're coming at an issue, and I call it an issue that we stopped doing the print model in about 2013, I want to say, and so now it's a digital model, but it's the same process, you have 1000s of headlines, and then you read through them. And the meeting, where you read through all those headlines is the most agonizing meeting you can imagine. It's pure boredom, and just monotony. But every once in a while, has this list of headlines as being read in a kind of monotone by someone who's half asleep, a headline will pop up where a couple of people will say, Oh, okay, that was kind of funny. And then at the end of reading through 1000, you've got a list of like, 1520 that a couple of people thought were pretty good. And then you look at those in the light of day, and you start talking about, okay, can we tweak these, usually, they're pretty solid as is you don't want to tweak it too much. You're losing that magic of the first laugh. As John Lasseter calls it at Pixar, that's a priceless moment that you're capturing where the room is serving as the audience to the comedy, you'll never get that back. Once you all know the joke, you start talking about how you can escalate the joke, whether it should be a big story or a small story, whether it should be you know, headline only, and people start riffing on it. And the true value of the humor starts to bubble up.

Jeff Dwoskin 26:28

Is the person who writes the article, always the same person who wrote the headline, or do you guys,

Scott Dikkers 26:33

I always used to love to mix and match, I would always give the story to the writer who I thought would do the best job with that particular story, because everyone kind of had their strengths. And however, I've noticed when other people are editing the onion, they often will give the writer have the headline, the job of writing the story. It just seems like one of those things that it's a hard habit to break. But I think it's much better to give it to whoever can write it better.

Jeff Dwoskin 26:57

That makes sense. It makes sense to me. Yeah. Sometimes coming up with the idea, doesn't it? Yeah, I was like, no, no, that's all I had. That's all I got.

Scott Dikkers 27:04

Yeah, so that does happen quite a bit. Because sometimes this often happens with a list of jokes. The one that everyone loved from your list is the one that you almost didn't put on the list because you thought it was so dumb people neglect to consider just how valuable dumb is in comedy. Like it's really important to be dumb.

Jeff Dwoskin 27:24

How I know that feeling. I know writing jokes, going to an open mic to try them out or try them out in a set. And you always have the one you're like, This is the one that's gonna change my life. This is the right way. You know what I mean? Yeah, this is the one that I'm going to throw it in. And then that's the one that kills Yeah, and becomes the one you never can get rid of. Because it's the great everyone laughs becomes your catchphrase. The other one that was brilliant. goes away have a no, no. It's happens all the time. Well, you never know that's just got throw them all out. So are thrown out to the audience. Yep, let them decide. So when people come do they have to come with ideas in the different categories, like you got to come with local entertainment sports like so to make sure the guy you have a max is that part of the assignment. Once the

Scott Dikkers 28:12

onion got to be to a certain size, and we started doing the digital model instead of the print model, then there was a little more of that kind of assigning of topics, news of the day, what's the 24 hour news cycle story that everyone's going to expect us to comment on, etc. But before that, and still today, there's a lot of just write whatever's on your mind, because part of what makes the onions special is that it's just tapping into the zeitgeist, you know, whatever happens to be on these really interesting, funny people's minds. That's what we should talk about. So it's good to not have too much direction or parameters at that stage.

Jeff Dwoskin 28:49

Gotcha. In my research, I found that you've won many awards, a Peabody 30 Webby Awards, Thurber prize for American humor. Nice to see you're being recognized. You know, it's

Scott Dikkers 29:01

rare, because mostly comedy is not recognized in its time. I think it helps that the onion is in print. I think if the onion had been a stand up performer, it would not have won any of those awards. Because stand up is not recognized in its time usually takes 20 years before somebody gets the Mark Twain prize and they have to be really rich and famous at that time. And that's certainly war, but there's no like standees away.

Jeff Dwoskin 29:25

Very true, very true.

Scott Dikkers 29:26

Somebody needs to

Jeff Dwoskin 29:27

make that I'll write that down. I'm going to come up with that idea. And then I'm gonna sell it to you for $16,400 Now you're thinking as long as Jay says it's okay.

Scott Dikkers 29:37

No, I'm sure. Your own awards, you you make up the stand appease the standees. You'll beat him in the marketplace.

Jeff Dwoskin 29:47

I imagine there was joy amongst the staff yourself moving from print into the worldwide web. It makes it easier like you had mentioned having issues with the print people with the swears in the penis By moving into self publishing on the web, one of the interesting things that came with that was your ability to challenge and go after attribution, that a lot of times people would share on your articles, and you guys wouldn't even get credit or they wouldn't know specifically, it originated from you, which I know attribution is a big deal.

Scott Dikkers 30:19

Yeah, it was a big problem, especially since we decided very early that we were never going to put names on stories, because we didn't want any individual writer to become like a celebrity. We wanted the onion itself to be the celebrity. So no names on stories that made it hurt even more when a famous radio DJ, or whatever would read an onion story verbatim because it got emailed to them without crediting the onion. And they just thought, oh, it's one of those funny emails that's going around, I'm going to read it live on the air. But at the time, we didn't know any of those benefits. Going online was a complete afterthought. And it was a very minor thing. It was like trying to think of an analogy to today, an analogy to today would be like, you're working with the onion, you're putting out the onion, and somebody on the tech staff comes to you and says, Hey, there's this new social media app. It's called comedy app. And you should we should be on there with a page. And I'm like, okay, yeah, it's another platform when we go on there. That's exactly what it was like to go online in 1996. because not a lot of people knew about websites, everybody was using email. But the idea that you could actually go to a website, a homepage and read like a magazine, I was like, Okay, put it on, maybe we'll get some more people to see the onion, didn't envision at all that it would solve our printing press problem that would help make the onion more of a recognized brand. And obviously, that was the reason I wanted to do it, we would always go into other media, as soon as we could, we started going on the radio really quickly, made a TV pilot as soon as we could, etc, etc, did a book. So that was all part of the strategy, you just never know which one of those things is going to hit doing the internet was like this kind of experimental thing. And it cost us $400 To get the domain name, the onion.com. And my business partner at the time was like, we're not wasting $400 on that it's not worth it. So we really had to lobby for that.

Jeff Dwoskin 32:16

That's really funny. And $400 Back then actually, probably was a lot. And I mean,

Scott Dikkers 32:22

it was a chunk for us like that we weren't sitting pretty didn't have a big pile of money in the bank, you know, we had payroll to make every week. So that was a big expense.

Jeff Dwoskin 32:31

The funny thing also, for those listening who maybe are younger in that time to get a domain name. It's not like GoDaddy right now where you pay and it's you there was no GoDaddy was right. It was like an Epson or something like where you'd go in, you register for it. And like a week later, you find out if he even got it wasn't even like it took days to find out if you got a domain.

Scott Dikkers 32:54

We needed some sort of local web host. So we knew like our computer guys knew this other computer nerd who was starting this internet company, and you had to have special arcane knowledge to like, register a domain. And he knew how to do that. And it was so funny, because after the onion was online for a while we stuck with that company. It was like this guy who started this company. So he was our internet service provider. And he came to us one day and he said, this is like years later. And he said, guys, you're using up so much of my allotted bandwidth. I'm paying so much money just to keep you guys able to receive traffic. And we felt so bad for him. We had no idea like he never told us that the onion was by far the highest traffic getter of all the other like websites that he had, because he was just this like local Madison, Wisconsin, one man, internet service provider, and he had to buy new servers all the time to handle the traffic. And that was very sad.

Jeff Dwoskin 33:56

Those are the days right. You had though they were all internet service providers. You never had to buy a coaster because you got a CD from AOL every day in the mass. Right.

Scott Dikkers 34:06

The 90s Talk to

Jeff Dwoskin 34:07

me about lawsuits. I did my research. I've did find a nice one about Janet Jackson suing you.

Scott Dikkers 34:16

Yeah, so she never sued us. But oh, no. There were many threats of lawsuit. The thing that always got us off, you know, an onion never really got successfully sued for making fun of anyone. Even though so many people got upset and tried to sue us. Michael Bay got really upset by an article one time Steven Seagal got really upset he ended up being in the onion movie after.

Jeff Dwoskin 34:42

That's because it only had two words. So it was perfect for him.

Scott Dikkers 34:44

Yeah, the Trump threatened us with lawsuits. Michael Cohen, I guess threatened us though. My theory now is that it was Trump pretending to be Michael Cohen because now we know that he used to do that he used to call People Magazine. Pretend to be publicist John Baron

Jeff Dwoskin 35:00

Right, I read that. Okay, so you almost got sued by Trump

Scott Dikkers 35:03

almost got sued by Trump. And this is, you know, way back 2012 2013. But yeah, every time they call their lawyer, they look into it, or they try to file papers. People are like, Dude, it's satirical, you're gonna lose like, we have freedom of the press in this country. So what are you doing? The most dangerous one was the Janet Jackson one, which our lawyer just brilliantly scuttled. I don't know, you know, his, his skill at preventing us from getting sued was legendary, our attorney Ken artists, but that was a situation where we had clearly defamed her, and she was really angry and wanted to sue. So in that situation, someone can nuisance sue you and just make you pay a lot of money to defend yourself and run you out of business happens all the time. Melania Trump is known for doing that sort of thing. And it's a lot of rich people's tactic for crushing people like an insect. So we were lucky to avoid that,

Jeff Dwoskin 36:03

that article title dying boy gets wish to pork, Janet Jackson.

Scott Dikkers 36:09

Yes, that was the story. That was his story.

Jeff Dwoskin 36:12

Well, I'm glad Janet didn't take you down. At the time, the

Scott Dikkers 36:15

onion was not that well known. So when people would get made fun of in the onion, they would be really hurt. And they'd be really upset. And they'd be like, Oh, how dare this newspaper? Make fun of me. But now everybody knows it's comedy. So when people get made fun of they're excited. They're like, part of the comedy culture, you know, they're in the club or whatever. It's like being made fun of on SNL. You've made it

Jeff Dwoskin 36:38

right now. Now, you'd be in the cool club. Right? I get it early on, if you don't get what's going on. It's it's weird.

Scott Dikkers 36:44

Yeah, that's how it was. We got threatened with a lawsuit by Frito Lay at one point, because we made fun of their terrible potato chips. And then I remember distinctly, roughly 10 years later, we did an even worse story about Frito, lay potato chips, something about Olestra causing screaming Kraft fits or something like that. And not only did they not threaten to sue us, they sent us a fan letter with a big box of free potato chips. So that was the transition from being unknown to being a known quantity in comedy. That's the reality of how that works.

Jeff Dwoskin 37:18

That's really funny. That's a good evolution.

Scott Dikkers 37:21

It's great. Yeah, it's really handy being a household name. So everybody do that trick where you work tirelessly for 25 years to create a household

Jeff Dwoskin 37:32

name. You go, then you can get away with anything. Yeah, you really can have you need no other incentive free, free to lay potato chips. Right. So I was doing some research on the onion and I came across an interesting list. Just kind of funny which the Simpsons always get credit for predicting the future. And so this is a list of onion headlines that later came true. Fuck everything. We're doing five blades. That was in 2004. And then later, Gillette actually came out. This was during the blade wars. Yep. It's like a few months later than July came out with a fifth blade. Oh, this is a funny one. This was 2000. We were just talking about the internet area man consults, internet whenever possible. Yeah, predicting the growing dependence of the NRA. It's funny, we read it now. And you're like, well, it would be funny about that. Because it was 20 years ago. That's why that's, that's where it's funny. Oh, this is a good one new 5000 multimedia computer system downloads real time TV programs and displays them on monitor. That was 1998. Great. Yeah. It's so funny. You compare it to where everything's going and it starts to go in that direction. Yeah. Do you have any of your favorite headlines? Do you have any they kind of stick out in your head? I know, they're probably all, maybe, but I do

Scott Dikkers 38:52

have favorites. And one of them is that? Fuck everything. We're doing five plates. I love that story. And I love that headline. There's a couple of other headlines that have predicted the future. One of them is one of my favorites. It was after the 2000 election when George W. Bush won his court case and became president. The headline was Bush colon, quote, Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over. And so the whole article basically laid out what he would do over the next four to eight years. And during Bush's I think second term. Tom Friedman at the New York Times wrote a whole article about that story in the onion saying how did the onion know exactly what George W. Bush was going to do as president? They literally laid it out in chronological order prior to his presidency, so very proud of that as a future predicting headline. And then there's one very grim one. It was a few months before Chris Farley died. We did a news piece Chris Farley dies of hilarious heart attack. Oh, yeah. Very funny when it when it ran and I'm sure he would have laughed right along with it. But yeah, not not so funny after that had to be rough, because some of us knew him. You know, he was from Madison also. Man,

Jeff Dwoskin 40:09

that one probably became uncomfortable for a short period. Yet, are there any that you regret like that? You look back and go, Oh, I can't believe we did. Oh,

Scott Dikkers 40:17

yeah, there were ton of headlines back in the day, where, you know, we'd make fun of every kind of group. And you know, no matter how big or small, we were finding our way, you know, we're figuring out what makes good satire, we didn't really understand the formula of comforting the afflicted inflicting the comfortable, which apparently Dave Chappelle does, still doesn't understand. But we took a long time experimenting and making so many mistakes before we really got to that point. So yeah, a lot of embarrassment, a lot of mistakes to look back on.

Jeff Dwoskin 40:49

Here's a few headlines. I found an article that this was entertaining weekly, some of their favorite so I picked out some of my favorite from the list that I thought was hilarious. Fall canceled after 3 billion seasons. Somebody said like just I mean, you know, there's just so now there's your dumb right there. So funny though. It's so dumb but funny. archeological dig uncovers ancient race of skeleton people.

Scott Dikkers 41:13

That's a classic.

Jeff Dwoskin 41:16

Man. It's so funny. It's so funny. World death rate holding steady at 100%. Yeah, that's good stuff.

Scott Dikkers 41:23

That's a Todd Hansen headline right there.

Jeff Dwoskin 41:25

Todd Hansen. Yeah, he

Scott Dikkers 41:26

wrote that last one. I know

Jeff Dwoskin 41:28

that supposed to make him famous. Now. He's gonna become famous. I'm kidding. So then with the onion, the other kind of category of onion articles is ones taken seriously? Yes. But I found some that were kind of interesting. 98 Homosexual recruitment drive nearing goal.

Scott Dikkers 41:47

Yes. So the joke there was that in the elementary schools, they're actively trying to turn people gay. And the recruitment goal for that year was looking good, so that God Hates Fags guy. Remember him, Fred Phelps. He latched on to that article and link to it from his website as a sign that America's going into the toilet.

Jeff Dwoskin 42:10

So what's the chain when you're sitting at the onion, and the first person discovers it? Fred Phelps has now posted the Onion article, as fact, to back his nefarious claims. What's how does that flow through the onion? And you guys? Yeah, I remember exactly

Scott Dikkers 42:27

what happened of one of our computer guys checks fair gold, who was the guy who put up our first website and suggested the idea of doing a website. He just came to me and told me that this had happened. And I had heard about Fred Phelps. I knew about it. And I was like, Ooh, and then I said, Okay, is there any way that we could redirect? Anyone who came from his link to go anywhere we want? Does it have to come to that article? And he said, I could probably think of a way to forward that. So just to prank him or to screw with those people. We had a little fun, like brainstorming, where could we send them instead? If they click on that link, and we thought gay porn sites or whatever, we ended up just sending them to another onion story that was simply church cancelled due to lack of God.

Jeff Dwoskin 43:18

That is so funny. Yeah. It

Scott Dikkers 43:20

was a lot of fun. It was fun times.

Jeff Dwoskin 43:21

And this is 1998. So that redirect, while today probably would be no big deal was probably wizardry back then.

Scott Dikkers 43:28

He had to know some really complicated HTML probably. Yes.

Jeff Dwoskin 43:33

Very nice. Frustrated, Obama sends nation rambling. 75,000 word email 2010. Picked up by Fox nation.

Scott Dikkers 43:44

Yeah, so many people who should know better. So take on your story seriously,

Jeff Dwoskin 43:48

but even today, like Ted Cruz will retweet something from

Scott Dikkers 43:52

No, it still happens all the time. Well, it's like I was saying before how stupid people are like, the famous and the well heeled are no less stupid than the rest of the rabble. So they're all just believing everything they read.

Jeff Dwoskin 44:06

It's crazy. We live in a crazy time and then

Scott Dikkers 44:09

as we do we're crazy species I think anytime it's gonna be crazy.

Jeff Dwoskin 44:15

This was another funny one. I thought Kim Jong on name the onion Sexiest Man Alive 2012 The Chinese Communist Party quoted.

Scott Dikkers 44:23

Yeah, the official news agency of China for online news agency, rebrand that entire story verbatim. And they even added some of their own photos that they had of Kim Jong moon to spread because we have this like spread of photos. So that's yeah, unbelievable. And he now you see that story is another one that's come true. Because just the other day they had all this news come out about how he's lost weight. He looks great. Remember that? Yeah, he does. It does look actually pretty good. He's looking good. It's looking good, good looking dictator.

Jeff Dwoskin 44:54

So the other interesting thing that I found, I love the Dana Carvey Show and I was actually a big fan. Have to funny to fail. I love that documentary that Hulu did on it.

Scott Dikkers 45:03

Yeah, that was a really interesting document. I love it.

Jeff Dwoskin 45:06

I talked a little bit about I had John Glaser. He's one of the writers. I know John OD. Okay. Yeah. So he was when he was on the show, and we talked a little bit about that. Bob Odenkirk was a huge fan of the onion. Amongst other things, for those of us, he connected, you guys had actually written segments with Robert Smigel. For the show. I think only one aired by like, that must have been pretty cool. Because I mean, that was like, when you look back at that drastic comedy team that the merger synergize with those folks must have been crazy.

Scott Dikkers 45:35

That show was a real Nexus. Yeah. Because Smeagol reached out to us. And we worked on this material that Stephen Colbert was going to read as a news anchor. And you know, Louie CK is the head writer of that show. I mean, what a crazy collection of people. But yeah, that was exciting. And then their first show came out, and it bombed so bad, and I thought it was hilarious. I thought the Clinton breasts thing was really funny. But apparently, Primetime audiences don't want that. And so they were scrambling after that. And they ditched the onion segment.

Jeff Dwoskin 46:06

What could have been what could have been? Yeah, that's too bad. That is too bad. Yeah, there

Scott Dikkers 46:11

might have been like, who knows? Like, there would never have been a Colbert show. And there might have been like an onion news show. That co bear was the host of

Jeff Dwoskin 46:19

who knows. For a long time.

Scott Dikkers 46:21

Who knows.

Jeff Dwoskin 46:22

You mentioned earlier voices you did. Voice work. Yeah. Speaking

Scott Dikkers 46:27

of smuggle, I did TV funhouse. George W. Bush for his TV funhouse. Yeah,

Jeff Dwoskin 46:32

that is cool. Yes, that

Scott Dikkers 46:34

was really fun.

Jeff Dwoskin 46:35

I was reading all about you. And I'm like that one just stuck out. I'm like, Oh, that is so cool. You've done a lot of cool things for them. Like Wow, that must have been smugglers. Great. I'm

Scott Dikkers 46:45

a huge fan.

Jeff Dwoskin 46:46

It's funny to like when you realize the ambiguously gay duo is chorale and Cole bear? Yes. I didn't know that for ever. I mean, watch it a million times. And so I never realized it was even though with Bill

Scott Dikkers 46:57

cot doing the announce voice you may know Bill cot from what's that Special Olympics movie? The Farley brothers did a pretty big role in that. I don't know. But he's me. He's actually more famous now. Because he was on some kids show. He played like a principal on his show. Anyway, we're getting that's two into the weeks. All right, we're gonna pull back.

Jeff Dwoskin 47:19

Let's see what else. So that's, that's a lot about the onion. There's a lot of things that you've done since

Scott Dikkers 47:25

entering, like I would leave the onion and I would do things and I would come back that happened a lot.

Jeff Dwoskin 47:30

How many times did you leave and come back more times than

Scott Dikkers 47:32

I can remember, I left for a really long time in the early 90s, just to play pool. Because I was really tired. Because I had worked so hard for so many years, I just played a lot of pool, I got really good at it. And then I left again in the mid to late 90s To make a feature film and then again, early 2000s, to make a feature film left in the mid 2000s to start an animation company. And you know, left in 2014 Cut hung around teaching the onion classes at the second city in partnership with the onion for many years after that, but was pretty much out. And I don't think I'm ever going to go back. But in fact, I'm positive never going back. Yeah. And then since then, I've been teaching people to do comedy. Beyond those onion Second City classes online, I've got a website how to write funny where I pass on all of the comedy knowledge I've accumulated over the years that's been really rewarding is one of my favorite things about working at the onion. And being the editor in chief all those years was hiring new people and training them to write comedy, the way I would always do it was I would train them how to write it in a fundamental way I wouldn't just teach them how to do an onion story is an onion story is just one type of comedy. But if you teach the fundamentals, then those people can go off and write for TV, they can do books or stand up or whatever they want to do. And I'm so proud of all the people who have left the onion have gotten really amazing careers going and you know, every other medium, and we always prided ourselves on hiring people who have no comedy experience, you know, we wanted completely raw people with no bad habits. And so I like that now I like when people take my class just on a whim, like, I kind of want to do comedy, and then they take my class and then they're getting a job doing comedy professionally, like eight weeks later.

Jeff Dwoskin 49:22

So that's awesome. Pretty cool.

Scott Dikkers 49:24

Yeah, it's very rewarding.

Jeff Dwoskin 49:26

You have the website, how to write funny, calm the classes, which has for those listening, it has some free stuff, you can download some good amount. Yes, yeah, I do recommend taking the class as well. I think there was one point where I think your entire Facebook ad budget was spent on me because every time I went on Facebook,

Scott Dikkers 49:44

that's funny. I would recommend the class for anyone who's really serious about comedy. I got a few classes on there. There's one basic how to write comedy course and there's another one that goes even deeper on how to succeed in the comedy business, which is not something you hear a lot of people talk about. Teach. But if you're just you know, have a passing interest, the free ebooks are gonna be fine. And you know, I have books for sale on Amazon. There's four books now and how to write funny series. And if you read all those, you'd be pretty well armed to do just about anything you want to do in comedy as well. I didn't see a good book when I was starting out, and I would have bought it. Like I was really interested, I got Steve Allen's book, which was a waste, but I really wanted a book that would just spell out how you do this, like, tell us the tricks. How do you write comedy? How do you compose a job? How do you know it's gonna work. And so I felt like after about three decades, doing it professionally, and really knowing it backwards and forwards that I should just share all that knowledge and just make it very plain and simple. So that's what I've tried to do.

Jeff Dwoskin 50:45

That's very cool. And Scott also has a podcast called I do, how to write funny,

Scott Dikkers 50:51

yeah, where I interview people in the comedy business, in front of the camera, and behind and all around anyone who's like succeeding at comedy. It's really fun to talk about people's path, you know, and how they got into comedy and how they decided they were funny and needed to be in comedy. So many people need it. Very few people in comedy are in it, because they just kind of want it. And that's the sort of stuff I would always talk to people about anyway. So when I started the podcast, and I started the podcast, oh my god, I think it was 20. I want to say 2009 When I recorded my first episode of that podcast, and I don't do it every week, so I don't have like 5000 episodes at

Jeff Dwoskin 51:33

this point. At this point, you would be the biggest backer I know. I'd

Scott Dikkers 51:37

be Mark Marin at this point. But no, I do it whenever I have the space to do it. So it's one of the curses and blessings of podcasting is that you don't have to have it done at a certain time.

Jeff Dwoskin 51:51

I can't thank you enough for hanging with me sharing your time with me

Scott Dikkers 51:54

much. Cheers. Yeah, it's been fun. Thanks for your interesting and probing questions. My pleasure.

Jeff Dwoskin 51:59

Thanks for your amazing answers. Sure. Is there anywhere specifically, people can keep keep up with you on the socials.

Scott Dikkers 52:06

Oh, you know, if you Google me and even if you misspell my name, I come up so anybody wants to follow me? They'll find me.

Jeff Dwoskin 52:13

Cool. I'll dig him up. I'll put them in the show notes. Thank you. You're welcome. Well, thank you for many, many years, decades of laughter thank you for Jim's journal.

Scott Dikkers 52:23

It has been my pleasure, I must say.

Jeff Dwoskin 52:27

Thanks again. All right, everyone. That was Scott Dikkers founding editor of the onion. That was a joy for me. I've been a huge fan of the onion for so many, many, many years. Great talking to Scott and hearing some of the stories behind the headlines. So fine, hope you enjoyed it. And definitely check out Scott's website. If you want to learn how to be funny. I'll put a link in the show notes. Scott's a great teacher. He's got lots of great resources. So definitely check that out if you're interested in learning to be funnier and get a job in the funny job market.

Well as the interview is now over that can only mean one thing that's right, it's time for a trending hashtag from the family of hashtag games at @hashtagroundup. Grab that free always free. Never cost a penny app from Google or Apple Play stores downloaded to your phone get notifications every time a hashtag game starts we play every day all day play along and one day one of your tweets may end up on an episode of live from Detroit the Jeff Dwoskin show fame and fortune awaits you. Today's hashtag is #CouldBeALegitHeadline. That's right going with a theme that sometimes those onion headlines might be mistaken for real hashtag could be a legit headline was brought to us by fun sized tags a weekly Game On hashtag Roundup. These are just absurd headlines. It could be legit. Here's a few of my favorites as always, I retweeted at Jeff Dwoskin show on Twitter, hunt him out show him some love retweet I'm like alright, here we go. #CouldBeALegitHeadline: murder Hornets expected to double in size next year due to global warming. Florida conspiracy theorists man died when alligators ate his body after homemade rocket exploded in his backyard. Man Marries a cardboard cutout of Marilyn Monroe. Disney buys Amazon cast Johnny Depp has Jeff Bezos MC Hammer diagnosed with COVID can't touch anything quarantine. super freaked out Can't touch this. Can't touch this. Son of files lawsuit against Earth demanding back payment for billions of years of free energy. Man stubs toe on coffee table for 50th time doesn't say a word. Hashtag game changes election results GOP furious. Scientists union Expanding must go on diet. Mars sighs asteroid headed for your anus? Robot aliens from the future overthrow an Applebee's. And our final #CouldBeALegitHeadline. Disney announces a remake of The Lion King CGI remake. I write that's Disney for you. constantly bringing back everything that worked once before.

Oh, okay. All right. Tweet your own #CouldBeALegitHeadline tag us at Jeff Dwoskin show. I'll take a look for it. I like it. I'll retweet it. I'll do something. I'll comment. As always tweet at us at Jeff Dwoskin show. I love hearing from you. And any feedback you have on the episodes? Well, we have reached the end of episode 92. I can't believe it. The first episode of 2022 was in the books. I want to thank my special guest, Scott Dikkers for joining me. And of course, I want to thank all of you for coming back year after year. I can't thank you enough means the world to me, and I'll see you next time.

Announcer 56:07

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Jeff Dwoskin show with your host Jeff Dwoskin. Go repeat everything you've heard and sound like a genius. Catch us online at the Jeff Dwoskin show.com or follow us on Twitter at Jeff Dwoskin show and we'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai