The Onion plans wall-to-wall satire for election

updated 9:51 a.m. ET Nov. 3, 2008

NEW YORK - Days before the January 2001 inauguration of President Bush, the Onion ran a story headlined: "Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over.'"

Writers at the satirical paper still speak reverentially of the story, in which Bush promises to take the country into a deep recession, worsen the environment and "end the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton."

"Wow, was that prescient," marvels Joe Garden, the Onion's features editor.

Whether or not you share that political viewpoint, the Bush era will end soon and the political comedy epicenter will shift to Barack Obama or John McCain.

At the Onion — "America's finest news source," as it calls itself — this change in the Oval Office is a welcome opportunity for new material after eight years of Bush and an interminable presidential campaign.

"Everyone started being like, ‘Nothing is funny in politics. We're done talking about it,'" says Assistant Editor Megan Ganz.

Regardless of who's elected Tuesday, it's clear satire has won in 2008. "Saturday Night Live," "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" have all been at the top of their game, with record ratings to show for it.

But the Onion is a slower moving, more broadly social animal of satire. It is, as Editor Joe Randazzo calls it, "the satirical newspaper of record."

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Founded 20 years ago by two students from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the Onion gradually grew under Editor Scott Dickers and went national in 1996 when it started its Web site. (The move was partially inspired by the viral spreading of the story: "Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia: Cities of Sjbvdnzv, Grzny to be first recipients.")

It was around then that the Onion really honed its approach as always rigidly couched in dry writing style with slick graphic displays.

The paper, distributed weekly in 10 cities, has a circulation of about 900,000 and is now based in New York. The more profitable Web site draws 5.5 million unique visitors per month and earlier this year won seven Webby awards, second only to The New York Times.

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All the while, the Onion has spread to other media forms. It has published numerous best-selling books, including the rewrite of history, "Our Dumb Century," and the mock atlas, "Our Dumb World," which was just released in paperback.

The paper also comes with a serious and respected entertainment section of criticism called the A.V. Club. Onion Radio News is a daily one-minute podcast that consistently ranks among the most popular on iTunes.

And last year, the Onion launched the Onion News Network, a parody of a 24-hour TV news network, perhaps the Onion's most costly startup with a staff now of 20 making videos with high production value.

ONN executive producer Will Graham and head writer Carol Kolb (a former editor of the paper) translated the Onion sensibility to video, with stories such as "John McCain accidentally left on campaign bus."

The talent, Graham says, is often instructed to read the news without the slightest hint that they're joking.

"Think ‘Schindler's List,'" they're told.

Though the ONN — which produces 15 videos a month — may not yet be as profitable as the rest of the Onion projects, Randazzo says the privately held Onion Inc. is "pretty healthy fiscally" despite the downturn in ad sales brought on by the economic crisis.

"I try to avoid the idea that people care a lot about the Onion, or at all about the Onion," says Garden, who has been with the Onion since 1990. "Then you're sort of infected with a weird sense of self-importance and that just doesn't fit with what the Onion is. The Onion started as an outsider publication, I think the Onion works best as an outsider publication."

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