Scott Dikkers, founding editor of the The Onion satirical newspaper and TheOnion.com humor website, entertained an Elon University audience on Tuesday night in a campus visit sponsored by the Liberal Arts Forum.
The stories that make Scott Dikkers the proudest from his days of editing The Onion satirical newspaper are those that predicted the future.
For instance, The Onion’s January 2001 article “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’” foreshadowed America’s invasion of Iraq, tax reform that increased the national debt, and cuts to social services affecting millions of people.
On a lighter note, there was the February 2004 article “(Expletive) Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades,” a mock column “written” by James M. Kilts, the very real CEO and president of the Gillette Company. In it, Kilts claimed that Gillette wouldn’t let competitors get away with a razor featuring four blades. Gillette would make one with five.
Two years later, the company actually did.
But if there’s one thing Dikkers has learned over the past quarter century as one of America’s leading comedic geniuses, it’s that humor only resonates when it targets the right people. No one laughs at gags making fun of victims. As he told an Elon University audience in Tuesday night remarks on campus, lampooning people or organizations responsible for societal ills generates the most laughs.
Hundreds of students filled McCrary Theatre for the evening lecture “The Funny Story Behind the Funny Stories” hosted by the Liberal Arts Forum, a student-run and Student Government Association-funded program that brings to campus each year guests who foster conversations about current interdisciplinary topics.
The program centered on Dikkers’ influential role in launching The Onion, one of the world’s biggest comedy brands, and subsequent books and entertainment projects linked to its style and tone.
Dikkers described himself as an unathletic, small child with no social skills and few friends. He was often bullied. His parents later divorced. “Put all that together and I had an awesome childhood, as you can imagine,” he quipped.
It wasn’t until he discovered MAD Magazine that Dikkers found humor to be a coping mechanism. With its biting satire and sophomoric jokes, the magazine inspired Dikkers to begin a comic strip for his high school newspaper. The comic eventually won a Wisconsin high school journalism contest and pointed him toward a career in comedy.
“Jim’s Journal,” a strip Dikkers later syndicated to several college newspapers, caught the attention of Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, two University of Wisconsin students who quickly recruited him to contribute to a new humor magazine they were launching: The Onion. Dikkers agreed, and after the third issue, Keck and Johnson asked whether Dikkers would want to serve as editor.
According to Dikkers, within a few months, the opportunity presented itself to buy The Onion from its two founders. That required Dikkers to not only find the money – which he did – but then recruit the most talented comedy writers he could find. “We did not search high and low (for writers),” Dikkers said “We just searched low, actually. For dropouts, and the disaffected. These were our A players. Why? They were smart, they were bitter, and they had no prospects in life.”
Just as he had discovered in his own youth, those who were bitter or broken had honed comedy to cope with their circumstances. “It’s a defense mechanism,” Dikkers said. “Most of our writers came from broken homes and I think all of them were on some form of antidepressant medication.”
Writers had simple jobs, Dikkers said. Attend weekly meetings. Pitch ideas. Write one story a week. The more freedom he gave his writers, the more work they created, and the better they got. Eventually they got to be stronger writers than Dikkers.
“The goal is to eventually surround yourself with a team that is better and smarter than you,” he said. “The one drawback to that plan is that eventually you become the dumbest person in your company – but that’s the secret to cultivating your A players.”
Dikkers spent much of his nearly 90 minutes on stage tracing the evolution of The Onion from a traditional humor magazine to a parody news publication that, in the mid 1990s, expanded online with TheOnion.com. Since then, various books, video projects and satire websites have enhanced The Onion’s mission of entertaining audiences with satire and farce.
What does it mean that many people still confuse The Onion with real news? Dikkers laments that it’s because those people don’t know how to read critically.
He also left his audience with nuggets of wisdom as students embark on their own careers:
- Live your mission. Find out what you love to do and just do it.
- Invest your passion, not your money. You don’t want to “bet the farm” on a big business venture.
- Be prepared to “scrap everything” and prepare to fail.
- Trust the people who work for you. Just tell them what to do and leave them alone to do it.
- Don’t work hard, and don’t work smart. Instead, work right. No ideas are completely original. See what’s already been attempted and learn from others’ successes and mistakes.