With all the serious news around last year, reports such as "Clinton takes leave of office to stand in line for Star Wars: Episode 1", "Nothing in rule book says hockey player can't be orangutan" and "New study finds college binge drinking to be a blast", may have slipped your notice. If so, then you obviously weren't seeking respite from a world seemingly gone mad in weekly online humour magazine, the Onion (www.theonion.com).
Starting as a paper in 1988, and going online five years ago, the Onion is still run from a small office in the US mid-west city of Madison, Wisconsin. Not a state with the social cachet of, say, New York or California, Wisconsin's main claims to fame, or infamy, are that it spawned communist witch-hunter Senator Joe McCarthy and cannibal serial killer Jeffery Dahmer. It's a situation, however, which suits editor Rob Siegel.
"There are advantages and disadvantages here," he says. "We probably could have grown bigger faster in a bigger city, but when you're removed from the craziness of New York or Los Angeles it's easier to make fun of it. "For instance, Spy magazine was mixing in the same circles as the people they were supposed to mock. We're not even in Madison high society. We're kind of the underdog here. We haven't been co-opted by the coasts." This underdog status is a point echoed by Onion writer Maria Schneider when talking about Madison newspapers the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal. "We don't rank very highly compared to the local papers here. We do get inspiration from them though about how not to write. We're still seen as a college paper."
College paper or otherwise, the Onion has expanded rapidly in the last few years. With separate editions for Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Denver, it has a print run of 200,000 copies per issue. It is through the Web, though, that its name has spread furthest and fastest. With 550,000 people worldwide accessing the site every week, the little college-town paper has made the online transition with ease and great success.
"There was no sort of `in 10 years we want to be. . .' type thing," says Siegel. "We never really had a plan from the start. That's part of the success; we've grown organically. We're not some start-up company with a five-year plan." Nevertheless, the Onion is now branching out into more traditional media. The Onion radio news is already broadcast on over 200 American radio stations and Onion television may be next. "We've had negotiations on `Eye on the century' specials with various networks. They are aware of us, but nothing has happened yet. We'd spread ourselves too thin at the moment if we did that," he says. America's conservative TV networks may be wary of a magazine which has featured such headlines as "Jesus `Really dreading' this next birthday," and "Lewinsky subpoenaed to reblow Clinton on senate floor".
Such reticence is unlikely to compromise the paper's editorial independence though. "We do get a lot of complaints," says Schneider. "Most of them are from born-again Christians."
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the paper's content, however, is that they often use humour to make a very serious point. Headlines such as "Retrocrazed German youths invade Poland" and "Crazed Palestinian gunman angered by stereotypes", are more than just very funny - they also show a greater awareness of events outside the US than many "serious" American papers do. But do the readers get the humour?
"We wouldn't put them in the paper if we didn't think a certain number of people would understand the issues behind them," says writer John Krewson. "Our stories on Bosnia, Kosova and Somalia are some of the most read stories on these issues. I don't think most Americans get what those stories are about on regular papers and TV."
In a further blurring of the division between a humorous look at news (the Onion) and a look at humorous news (a lot of the content in many mainstream American papers) the print edition of the Onion looks very like USA Today. "We want to present this image of being a massive monolithic organisation - the news drops down from heaven, spit out from AP copywire," says Siegel. And despite what often initially looks like a tasteless take on current affairs, there is generally a message in their madness.
Our Dumb Century - The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines is available in bookshops now
pcollins@irish-times.com