Just like that, The Onion goes back into print

Man I should've written that "Print is F*cked" article YEARS ago

I’m pausing in the middle of a long elegy on the genius of Gene Wilder for my upcoming Encyclopedia of American Comedy to address the announcement that The Onion is bringing back its print edition as a sort of superfan membership card.

INTERESTING.

The Onion, as my wife the Badger would tell you, began as the student humor magazine of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Kate knew a lot of those folks—Todd Hanson, Scott Dikkers—who were also cartoonists at The Daily Cardinal. The Onion’s initial format was simple: an eight-page newsprint tabloid with coupons running along the bottom that you could cut off and present to local retailers for various deals and goodies.

The parody style was a slight tweak from how it was usually done—not a one-time parody of a specific publication, but an ongoing McPaper as a container to parody everything. This increases the range of the thing, while removing any threat of lawsuit—utter genius. The Onion is just like life, only funny. Though you can see glimmers of this approach in the National Lampoon’s Sunday Newspaper Parody from 1978, The Onion committed even harder to the bit, and did so brilliantly. It is impossible to imagine contemporary comedy without The Onion, and since we’re all friends here, I can admit that I’ve always been really annoyed I didn’t think of it first. Then again, ideas are two-a-penny; it was the great collection of people they gathered, and the great editing up top, that made The Onion work. There’s never been anything finer.

Anyway, after conquering Madison, its print edition was expanded to various large college towns in the Midwest—Champaign/Urbana, Ann Arbor, Boulder—with local ad reps selling for each town. As I mentioned in my earlier post, print humor works best in dense accretions of smart people compressed into small metro areas; college campuses are especially perfect for free distribution, as all those communal spaces rack up immense amounts of what mag-people call “pass-along value.” But The Onion wasn’t a magazine, which was very important; it was cheaper to produce, and lighter to truck around, and the more they printed, the bigger this advantage became.

“I have this Onion newspaper box with the last ever print issue still in the display window,” wrote Reddit user @maximillious. If I had any money, I’d buy this off them.

For ten years or so, The Onion prospered; this being America, a move from Madison to New York was inevitable and, IIRC, accompanied by the usual dreams of world domination. Which, if this were a just reality, The Onion would have achieved—one gets the same buzz, the same seamless hilarity, that you get from the first five years of The National Lampoon.

But it was not to be.

First, the very thing that made The Onion such a world-beater—material that was tailor-made for free sharing, first via email (Onion heds make great subject lines), and then via social media—did not make it money. It had to somehow make money after the fact, like charging someone after they’ve eaten the ice cream cone. The Onion’s hilarious omnipresence generated more than their fair share of superfans, but there’s only so much merch one person can buy. (We’ve had the same problem at Bystander.) The Onion is a poster child for the demise of professional media, a hugely popular, beloved content creator that is somehow expected to survive while giving its product away for free.

This leads to the second problem. To have any hope of making enough money to sustain itself, The Onion had to try to partner up with the huge, fickle companies of questionable taste that were already producing comedy, and in that partnering up, had its magic diluted, and its talent poached.

The National Lampoon was able to create Animal House for the same reason Robert Altman could pull off M*A*S*H: it was a little nothing picture, and nobody at the studio was paying attention. The moment the big machines got a hold of National Lampoon, it was cooked, and the same thing happened to The Onion…except that comedy being so much bigger business in the early 2000s than it had been in 1978, The Onion didn’t get that one chance to make their under-the-radar masterpiece. There were lots of announced projects, stuff that fizzled, probably stacks of great pitches and drafts of screenplays…But nothing with the marvelous weirdness and obsessiveness and compression that made stuff like Our Dumb Century so unbelievably great.

The parent company did all the predictable pivots—parodying web culture with Clickhole; moving to video and launching a parody news network; trying to get into movies; trying its best to make money via wonderful books and merch. But as of 2015, The Onion found itself making the lion’s share of its revenue (and all of its profit) from an in-house advertising agency.

But the story may have a happy ending: In April of this year, The Onion was acquired by a new outfit, Global Tetrahedron; it seems as though they are Onion fans with Silicon Valley money. (The name is a callback to a running joke in Our Dumb Century.) This is about the best possible outcome; the new owners seem to understand the cultural importance of The Onion, and have the money to keep it fed and watered. At this point, a big splashy success is about the least important thing The Onion could pull off; it does more for all of us just by existing, which I am sure it can do permanently…if they don’t overreach.

I’m very glad The Onion has happened; the world is so much better for it. The people I’ve met and worked with from The Onion, they are top-notch—as a fellow Gen Xer, I’m proud they created the comedy brand of my generation. If things break for them, they could be the prose comedy equivalent of The Second City. That would be a wonderful outcome.

So today they announced they are bringing back the print edition, not as a freely distributed box-delivered item, as in the old days, but something much smarter and more interesting—a membership. For $100/year ($60/year until August 31), members will receive a monthly print edition of The Onion. This is hitting me where I live; we’ve always referred to Bystander as “a membership card.” And like Bystander, it will automatically become collectible, a totem object, a statement of The Comedy Lifestyle.

Put simply, The Onion seems to be mimicking a Patreon-like arrangement, but running it in-house. That’s a good idea; Patreon’s an ass-pain and takes 10% besides.

Echoing my rap from 2015, “we’re bringing back print] for the same reason that 18-year-old kids are buying Taylor Swift on vinyl,” Onion Executive Editor Jordan LaFlure was quoted in Axios today. “We can introduce those same kids to the notion that a print publication is a much richer way to consume media.”

Hear, hear; print is great for comedy and the youngsters will love it. It’s a great little way to develop stuff—Animal House was developed from about four separate pieces from the print magazine. Plus, the print version is a cheap-to-produce upsell, and a way to gather that all-important mailing list of superfans. Very smart! Once you have enough superfans, you can do events—if they’re not already planning a convention, they should start. The Onion + Chicago’s improv scene + a city endlessly starved for media attention is a winning combination.

I won’t be shelling out $100/year, but I betcha thousands will, and the process of filling the website surely includes enough wastage to fill a monthly print edition many times over. I think it’s very, very smart—a nice way to use all parts of the buffalo, as we say around here. You’re already paying the staff, you have plenty of submissions, the layout is easy and fast…I think this new print edition of The Onion can’t lose, and I welcome them back to the ragtag fraternity of ink-stained wretches.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

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MICHAEL GERBER is Editor and Publisher of The American Bystander, and thinks The Onion’s Our Dumb Century is the most essential print parody since The National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook. (And, of course, Barry Trotter. :-)