All the News That's Unfit

By Jamie Malanowski

You might expect that a news entity that calls itself "America's Finest News Source" would want the boast spoken by James Earl Jones and accompanied by John Williams theme music. In fact, the title has been appropriated by the Onion, a droll weekly newspaper published in Madison, Wis., devoted to producing deadpan, dead-on parodies of the resolutely low-key news reports wire services put out. Consider these recent headlines:

--STARR TAUNTS CLINTON WITH HUMILIATING "SITTIN' IN A TREE" SONG ("Bill and Monica/ Sittin' in a tree/ K-I-S-S-I-N-G," Starr sang to reporters at a Washington Hilton press conference...")

--STATE DEPARTMENT TO HOLD ENEMY TRYOUTS NEXT WEEK ("More than 40 nations are expected to vie for the role of U.S. adversary, including India, Afghanistan, China, North Korea and Sudan.")

--CONCERNED PARENTS DEMAND REMOVAL OF ARSENIC FROM PERIODIC TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS("'Our schoolchildren, some as young as the fourth grade, are being exposed to this deadly element in their science classes...'")

You get the idea. Heck, maybe you can even execute the idea.

The decade-old Onion began as an alternative college-town paper and still carries the usual movie reviews and futon advertisements. Editor Scott Dikkers, 33, worked as a cartoonist during the publication's first year (he did three strips in three styles under three names, just so nobody would think the Onion had just one cartoonist), then bought the paper after a year from its founders. "For a long time we were kind of a Weekly World News parody combined with your usual sophomoric college-humor publication," says Dikkers. The moment of epiphany came in 1995, when, as Dikkers now says, he realized "I'm not particularly interested in humor. Nothing really makes me laugh. I thought if we could do a straight news parody, that could be really funny. That's when we really found our voice."

And a funny little voice it is too, with its mix of the banal and the absurd (U.S. STUDENTS LEAD WORLD IN TV JINGLE RECALL; GRECIAN FORMULA FALLS INTO NON-GRECIAN HANDS; HEALTH INSURANCE: ARE YOU PAYING ENOUGH?). It's also one you can expect to hear more of in the future. While the Onion has a circulation of 160,000 (it can be found on newsstands in Milwaukee, Wis., Chicago and Denver, as well as in Madison) and claims 200,000 readers on the Internet www.theonion.com) it will be sold in Borders and Barnes & Noble bookstores nationwide starting this week. Early next year Crown will publish Our Dumb Century, a compendium of mock front pages from editions of the Onion that, of course, never existed (JOHNSON VOWS TO HONOR KENNEDY'S MEMORY BY TAKING PLUMP YOUNG MISTRESS). And Dikkers says the Onion is talking with one of the networks--he won't say which--to do a special based on the book next spring.

The young editor's head hasn't been entirely turned by this attention from New York City and Hollywood. "I used to think that all we really needed to be a big success was to hook up with somebody in show business who knew what he was doing," he says. "Well, they don't really know what they're doing." Sounds like another hot news item for the Onion: HUMOR EDITOR DISCOVERS VAPIDITY IN HOLLYWOOD.

If it sticks to its comedy niche, the Onion may be in for a nice run; surely there will be no shortage of raw material. "We go through about 400 ideas a week to produce seven or eight stories," says Dikkers. "The hardest part of the job is eliminating all the crap." (Exactly! Here too!) Of course, the magazine could be undone by unwarranted expectations. Comparisons are already being made between the Onion and National Lampoon and Spy, two similarly funny and topical forerunners. But those magazines were editorially more ambitious than the Onion, had a wider range of approaches and interests, and featured better writing (as this writer, an alumnus of Spy, feels obliged to note). Right now readers of the Onion should just be grateful for the laughs.