How The Onion’s founding editor finds humor in the dismal age of Trump

Sometimes this election seems a lot more dangerous and existential than just a scary Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate, as parodied by The Onion.

As the presidential rematch bounces between an edgy legal thriller and a Stephen King horror story, a good laugh is perhaps the best medicine.

That’s what Scott Dikkers, the founding editor of humor publication The Onion, told me during an interview at the monthly meeting of the Atlanta Writers Club.

“Humor can’t exist in a state of fear, so we need it,” Dikkers told me. “If you’re too scared, you can’t do humor, so we need it. When people say ‘too soon,’ comedians say ‘It’s never too soon.’”

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The long-serving editor of The Onion added: “Humor is a coping mechanism, an underrated method for dealing with life’s tragedies. All who do comedy professionally know this, which is why they do it.”

He agreed with me when I related stories of being in Russia during its painful transition from Soviet communism to something resembling capitalism. I heard a lot of Russian jokes about the economy. For example, “What did Russians use for light before they had candles? Answer: Electricity!”

Now with Vladimir Putin in charge, jokes, and even laughter in Russia, may be illegal, as Russians are increasingly finding out.

“How do you create a balance with joking about Democrats and Republicans?” I asked.

“We don’t think of the divide as between Democrats and Republicans,” Dikkers replied. “We see the divide as between the haves and have-nots. It used to be [that] both parties would appeal to a different 50 percent. Now it’s one percent versus 99 percent as both parties appeal to the elites. And comedians want to appeal to the 99 percent. One party used to appeal to the 99 percent, but now it’s all muddied. Democrats used to appeal to labor, and the Republicans used to appeal to the rich establishment, but nobody seems to represent the have-nots anymore. So we can poke fun at both parties.”

For many Americans, nothing seems funny about the present moment. It’s a sobering summer. Civic tension is palpable. Laughter is scarce.

“How do you find humor in unfunny subjects?” I just had to know.

Dikkers answered my question with a question.

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“I mean, how do you make fun of nuclear weapons, the arms race, the Cold War?” he began while harkening back to one of The Onion’s historical publications, which poked fun at famous news events of yore.

He explained how The Onion got an idea from an old Bob Hope joke about the nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll: “Army finds the one place in the world untouched by war and blows it up.”

As “Uncle Ben” keeps reminding us in countless Spiderman movie remakes: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

With that in mind, the humor newspaper has had its share of newsmaking outside of its own humor headlines, such as it sale by G/O Media to something called “Global Tetrahedron” (which really sounds like a spoof from The Onion). Global Tetrahedron is actually a Chicago-based group of self-described digital media fans of The Onion who named their real company after a fake one created by the humor paper.

The Onion has also had to weather criticism from some purists that argue the newspaper’s humor just isn’t the same as before (like duh!).

Meanwhile, the humor newspaper waded into a Supreme Court debate over free speech rights.

After satirist Anthony Novak was arrested and charged with designing a fake website for the City of Parma, Ohio, police department, Novak sued Parma following his acquittal in court. The Onion wrote what has to be the funniest “friend of the court brief” (amicus curae for non-Latin dorks) on behalf of Novak v. The City of Parma (2022) to challenge the 6th Circut’s Court of Appeals move to dismiss the lawsuit.

The 23-page “brief “is replete with such gems as “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history” to “The Onion regularly pokes its finger in the eyes of repressive and authoritarian regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, and domestic presidential administrations. So The Onion’s professional parodists were less than enthralled to be confronted with a legal ruling that fails to hold government actors accountable for jailing and prosecuting a would-be humorist simply for making fun of them.”

Despite being the best brief in American legal jurisprudence (or at least the favorite one in my students’ law classes), the Supreme Court refused to grant Novak’s case a writ of certiorari in 2023, upholding the lawsuit’s dismissal, which was a chilling outcome for free speech in the United States.

Additionally, Dikkers noted several times in his talk about The Onion’s history where the publication faced lawsuits and “cease and desist orders,” showing that not all public officials can take a joke.

Thankfully, the comedic writing of The Onion team may be just enough to help us through the 2024 election — a battle to see whether our democracy will be sponsored by Facebook or Tesla.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.