By Richard Zoglin

MADISON, WISCONSIN was already a thriving media center in 1988 — it boasted two daily newspapers, two University of Wisconsin dailies, and a raft of alternative weeklies — when a pair of students decided to start a satirical weekly newspaper dubbed The Onion. Tim Keck and Chris Johnson recruited a motley crew of Gen X slackers, pranksters, and comedy nerds as contributors; set up shop in a three-bedroom student apartment, where they composed each issue on a rented Mac computer; and distributed 12,500 copies every Tuesday morning in Keck’s run-down Jeep Cherokee.

Early issues were a random mix of made-up news stories, cartoons, soap opera recaps, and excerpts from the campus police blotter. “Mendota Monster Mauls Madison,” read the banner headline on the first issue, accompanied by a blurry photo of a Loch Ness-type creature emerging from Lake Mendota. (It was actually Keck’s arm, with a stocking over it.)

The parody paper was an instant hit. Local merchants bought ads at such a rapid clip that before long The Onion was drawing more advertising than either of the two campus papers. Keck and Johnson moved on after a couple of years, but a succession of new editors and writers picked up the mantle and refined the product.

By the mid-1990s, The Onion had settled on a consistent, original and versatile comic strategy: All its made-up stories were rendered in the formulaic and matter-of-fact prose of newspaper headlines, from the most mundane local trivia (“Pen Stolen From Dorm Study Area”) to absurdist takes on the national news (“Mount Rushmore Adorned With New Neon Sign”; “Congress Hires Drummer”).

By the end of the decade, the paper had a nationwide following — the clear successor to Mad Magazine and National Lampoon as the satiric voice of its generation. Its success was capped in 1999 with a full-length book: Our Dumb Century, a retrospective of bogus front pages covering key historical events from the previous 100 years. The deadpan spoof (“Hoover Hopes to Restore Faith in Nation’s Banks with Free-Toaster Offer”; “Reagan Proclaims ‘Late-Afternoon in America,’ Takes Nap”) reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and may well be, pound for pound, the funniest book ever written.

Now The Onion has its own biography: Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire (Running Press, March 18). Written by Christine Wenc, an original staffer, it’s an affectionate, insider-y account of the paper’s beginnings, glory years and more recent rocky times — ownership changes, internal tensions, and mixed success with TV and movie ventures. (The Onion went online-only in 2013, before being bought by a digital startup and relaunching a monthly print edition last summer.)

The book conveys the renegade spirit and eclectic cast of Midwesterners who created the groundbreaking weekly. And if it doesn’t quite prove the case for its ambitious subtitle — Wenc’s field of view, disappointingly, doesn’t extend much beyond The Onion — the book does offer a useful perspective on the current explosion of political satire in the era of Donald Trump.

Even The Onion’s creators, with their fine sense of the absurd, couldn’t have anticipated a target so rich with possibilities. From New Yorker humor columns and Saturday Night Live cold-opens, to the bounty of Trump impersonators, song parodies, and animated lampoons online, the norm-busting US president offers nearly inexhaustible material. Often it doesn’t even require punchlines: Stand-up comedian Sarah Cooper became a TikTok sensation simply by lip-syncing to recordings of Trump’s boasts and tirades.

Trump also became an overriding obsession of the late-night TV comedians. Making jokes about the serving president had been a time-honored tradition on such shows, but the hosts usually kept their own political leanings to themselves. With Trump, they dropped this neutrality and began bashing him almost nightly. Now, just a few weeks into a new administration jam-packed with material, the question is whether they’ll have the stamina, and the gag lines, to make it through another four years.

LATE-NIGHT CROSSOVER
Fittingly, when Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show, Comedy Central’s nightly comedy newscast, in 1999, his first head writer was Ben Karlin, one of the key editors during The Onion’s maturing years of the mid-1990s. Together they moved the show into more pointed political satire: regularly skewering the Bush administration’s rush to war in Iraq; congressional dysfunction on both sides of the political aisle; and the right-wing pundits of Fox News.

It was a departure from the innocuous and even-handed “topical” jokes of Johnny Carson and his Tonight Show successors — with a heavy dose of Onion-like irony. Stewart’s deadpan stares and double-takes in response to particularly stupid video clips were the functional equivalent of those bone-dry Onion mock headlines.

Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015, just before the Trump era. By then he had become the model for a new band of late-night comedians — former Daily Show regulars like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, along with emboldened network hosts like Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel — who found in Trump an irresistible target.

This nightly mockery has had an impact on the national political conversation in ways that I don’t think have been fully appreciated. Newspaper editorialists, investigative reporters, and cable-news pundits can press the case against Trump with facts, political arguments, and legal analyses. But it’s the comedians who can really get to the heart of Trump’s craziness.

They scour the video clips that even the news shows miss, highlighting his most brazen comments and loony obsessions: his crusade against windmills, say, or his odd fixation with the “late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Meyers — who, for my money, has developed the best, most acid Trump impression on TV — was the first to pinpoint the tell that a Trump anecdote is made up: People are always coming up to him with tears flowing down their cheeks and calling him “sir.”

Late night’s ratings have fallen (along with the rest of traditional network TV) from the days of Carson, but the shows have gained a new audience online, where their bits are recycled and viewed millions of times. Their jokes get under the skin of their chief target, who regularly insults them as low-rated no-talents. During last year’s presidential campaign, the nightly skewering of Trump often seemed more on point than the official Democratic messaging.

And yet, judging by November’s election results, none of it made a whit of difference. Trump’s decisive victory and return to the White House has left the satirists a bit shaken — not to mention exhausted at the prospect of another four years of hammering a president who’s been the center of attention for nearly a decade. He’s the comedy gift that keeps on giving. But even the best jokes get old.

TRUMP, PART DEUX
I’ve never quite bought the argument that Trump’s antics — his wild rhetoric, nutty ideas, and overweening self-regard — have become too outlandish for satire. To be sure, some Onion headlines from the early days (like 1990’s “Canada Signs Nonaggression Pact With United States”) are now hard to distinguish from Trumpian reality. Yet satirists must go where the action is, and they are doing the job that has always been central to their mission: standing up for common sense and common values, calling out hypocrisy and foolishness wherever they find it, and defending the sensible middle against the extremes on both sides.

As Trump has entered his second term with guns blazing, the comedians aren’t backing off. But the stridency can be wearing. Colbert’s gleeful Trump-bashing, in particular, has become hard to watch — an insult comic throwing out red meat to the cheers of a like-minded audience. “I don’t even know what to say anymore,” Meyers pleaded after one of Trump’s loonier riffs on the California wildfires. “I’m so over this guy. I’m running out of clever retorts.”

Late-night hosts’ open partisanship (Colbert and Kimmel hosted major Democratic fundraiser last year) has also made it easier for the right to dismiss them as another branch of the “deep state” — and for the left to expect unwavering solidarity. When Stewart (who made a welcome return to weekly appearances on The Daily Show a year ago) poked fun at Joe Biden’s doddering performance at a press conference on his first show back, he drew an outcry from partisans on the left. Bill Maher’s contrarian criticism of Democratic overreach and the “woke” left, on his long-running HBO show Real Time, has drawn similar umbrage. But both have been a healthy corrective to what can seem, too often, like joking to the converted.

I always regarded The Onion as a satire of the media more than politics: a dead-on parody of the dry, detached language of “objective” journalism. But its political views were never far from the surface. Headlines like “Bush Urges Nation to Be Quiet for a Minute While He Tries to Think,” or “Need for Education Gets Valuable Lip Service” were sly commentary on the fecklessness of so much national politics and policymaking.

Just as important was The Onion’s distinctive Midwestern perspective — a sharp contrast to the Beltway obsessions of the national press and the Ivy League pedigree of National Lampoon. “The Onion was one of the few national publications to stick up for the economic underdog and argue for the worth and value of ordinary people,” writes Wenc, “the great mass of Area Men and Area Women stuck in a system they didn’t create or choose.”

Headlines like “Area Daughter Wearing Next to Nothing” or “Local Man Holding Out for Next Exit for Better Fast-Food Options” may have played for laughs, but they also reflected a truth about the gulf between the lofty, remote battles in Washington and the everyday trials and tribulations of those anonymous folks in the flyover states.

Is there a lesson here for the current band of political satirists? Some of The Onion’s cool detachment, its grounding in the concerns of ordinary folks who are alienated from a government that too often (but now more than ever) seems to make no sense, might help them get through another four years of Trump without sounding like hectoring lefties. “America Defeats America,” ran its headline following the election: “Democracy Triumphs Over Long-Running Democratic Experiment.” — Bloomberg