Funny because it's true How The Onion created modern American news satire

This reverent debut history from Wenc, who served as copy editor on the Onion's founding staff in the late 1980s, chronicles the satirical newspaper's rise and influence. She describes how in 1988, University of Wisconsin-Madison student Tim Keck started the Onion with classmate Chris Johnson to make some money before they graduated and quickly turned it into a campus sensation. Charting the paper's path to prominence, Wenc details how the Onion's 1996 online debut introduced the publication to readers beyond college campuses, and how the paper's pointed yet poignant issue responding to the 9/11 attacks earned plaudits while doubling readership. Wenc also covers the Onion's troubled recent history, detailing how friction between corporate owners and the editorial team over demanding workloads and the paper's 2012 move to Chicago drove staff turnover and burnout. The author sheds light on the publication's creative process, describing meetings during which writers pitch headlines that are collectively refined and later expanded into full stories, and she makes a persuasive case that the Onion's acerbic outlook has made it uniquely well suited to skewering the absurdity of American politics, pointing out that the paper was one of few outlets to cast doubt on the George W. Bush administration's false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The result is a surprisingly earnest celebration of a comedy institution. Photos. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Mar.)

The unlikely tale of America's funniest publication. Just about anybody with an internet connection has seen a headline from the satirical newspaperThe Onion, which specializes in deadpan parodies of traditional news stories ("Call Ignored in the Order It Was Received") and op-eds ("It's Not a Crack House, It's a Crack Home"). But as Wenc shows in this thorough and thoughtful history, the publication needed time to find its footing and often struggled despite its cultural ubiquity. Founded in 1988 by a group of University of Wisconsin students, it was initially a casual, try-anything Gen X affair. (Explaining its name, an editor says, "We ate onion sandwiches a lot.") But by the mid-1990s, after honing its editorial voice and (crucially) getting online early, it was effectively printing money, prompting various, often ill-fated expansion efforts. It moved operations to New York just before 9/11; investments in video often went sideways (a big-budgetOnion movie went straight to video); and writers often tangled with ownership, most prominently in 2012 when operations were moved back to Chicago despite vociferous protests by staff, who attempted a failed end-run around the owners. Wenc, an editor during the paper's earliest days, spoke with nearly all the major players, sometimes getting deep in the weeds of the publication's ever-shifting business strategy. But she consistently returns to a central irony in theOnion story: A publication designed to critique a cold-hearted, corporatized America had become an example of what it was attacking. "The Onion had long fought…ever-expanding media pollution and stupidity through courage, locality, and iconoclasm," Wenc writes, but ownership and Trumpism's own approach to fake news has often undermined its mission. To that end, the book is not just newspaper history, but an obituary for a generation's countercultural principles. Serious reading about funny business. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.