The Onion's Founding Editor Knows the Secret to Making Fun of Donald Trump
And he's here to paint a scary picture of our possible future.
By Luke O'Neil, May 25, 2016
Back during the George W. Bush administration, it became something of a cliché to talk about how impervious the president was to satire. How are you going to subtly highlight the goofiness of a man who seemed to be fully committed to upping the ante himself at every given opportunity? Compared to this election cycle, those look like the good old days. We had no idea what was in store for us in the form of one Donald J. Trump, a man whose every bloviating utterance is itself a self-parody of his already impossibly exaggerated persona.
If there's anyone up for the task, it's probably Scott Dikkers, a man who's done his fair share of satirizing both men, and almost everyone else of note over the years. Dikkers, a founding editor of The Onion and the author and editor of numerous books, recently published the definitive word on the mogul: Trump's America: The Complete Loser's Guide. The book, whose format will be familiar to anyone whose read Our Dumb World, Our Dumb Century, two like-minded collections from The Onion on which he served as editor, aims to prepare readers for out impending Trumpian future by explaining his origins—including a reproduction of his birth certificate, which "will hang in the main foyer of the White House, framed in rich mahogany," his middle school girlfriends ranked in order, and a newspaper clipping of a tragic Coney Island undertow accident that disfigured a young boy's hairline—and by laying out how things will work once he's president, including the daily schedule for the new First Penis.
For the book, Dikkers, who most recently started a comedy writing program at Second City in Chicago in partnership with The Onion, enlisted the aid of a large team of writers to compile the hundreds of articles, charts, and infographics that paint the entire picture of Trump the man—and the walking nightmare. We asked Dikkers to explain the process of putting the book together, whether or not it's as impossible to satirize Trump as it seems, the time Trump sued The Onion, and how the state of the news and media in general has changed in the decades since he began skewering it.
When did the idea for the book come about and how long did it take to execute it?
August of last year. It was sort of the end of what everybody was calling Trump's summer fling with the electorate—or the electorate's summer fling with Trump. We delivered it in February. That was lightning fast. The Onion's original books are very much in this category in terms of the size, and those each took over my life for like two years. So this was pretty crazy. It was a bigger team, and we all totally dedicated ourselves. I skipped a lot of meals and a lot of nights' sleep.
How did the writing process work with so many people involved?
It's he same as the process at The Onion. You get a large team to submit a bunch of jokes, and once you start to get the jokes in you see what's hitting and what's not. You get a sense of what's working and how you should structure the book. In the meantime, the raw ideas still keep coming in. I basically approve all those with the team's input, assign them all, do a draft, then another draft after everybody gives notes. Then, at the end of the day, it's just me alone at three in the morning trying to write things, edit things, and fill gaping holes. It's pretty much a mess. I'm kind of renowned at The Onion for very poorly managing these processes when we put together these big books. I find the more organized and orderly the process, the less magic you get. I like having a little bit of chaos: That's how you discover interesting new things you might not have discovered otherwise. I'm actually a distant relation of Ulysses S. Grant, a great, great uncle of some sort. I look at how he fought the Civil War and I'm like, oh my god, I've got that gene. I plow ahead and sacrifice millions and millions of jokes to get to the ones I need to achieve victory.
Was there a joke that came about from a particularly eureka-type moment in the midst of the chaos?
There were a few things like that. There's this little feature at the end called "How Will Trump Age in the White House?" During a meeting, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought it would be funny if we showed Bush and Obama clearly going from these young vibrant looking people to these gray, haggard-looking politicians, and then Trump's picture would be a young Elvis.
"Meet the New First Penis" was another. One of the writers, Brian Sweeney, said we should do something on Trump's penis. He did the most research, read all of the Trump books; he's a super smart guy with a very unique sense of humor. It was so well written and so funny, just about how the First Penis will be treated, what its responsibilities will be. Then there was a brainstorm that the picture should be this normal looking flaccid penis with the Trump hairpiece on it, and everyone cracked up. I immediately Googled it to make sure that nobody had done that joke, and miraculously no one had thought of that. Obviously the magic of that one is that it came true. That the penis would matter. I guess we intuited that because it just felt right.
When you started, did a Trump candidacy seem realistic? Did you change things along the way when it seemed like more of a possibility?
We were going to do this pseudo-pro-Trump voice as the main editorial voice. At the time it was a very fringe voice. Even now, the core fans that voted for him are still a small percentage of the population. But that voice just kept getting more relevant as his numbers kept going up and up. But when we started, we couldn't get the book published. My agent was like, "Trump is gong to be gone." I asked him to send it out to publishers anyway, and they all said the same thing: "Where's Trump going to be in the spring? Nobody is going to remember Trump." So we had to go this nontraditional route. It's kind of in between self-publishing and traditional publishing, but it's been working great.
Nobody thought it would have legs by the time it came out?
No. A writing friend of mine and I did a book on Jeb Bush that was done through a traditional publisher, and it came out in the spring. When the idea was hatched, Jeb Bush was the inevitable candidate. We thought, we must do something on Jeb Bush! We had done Destined for Destiny: The Unauthorized Autobiography of George W. Bush, and it did really well. We decided we'd do a parody of Bush's book about his father, a Portrait of my Father, and we thought we'd do A Portrait of My Knucklehead Brother Jeb. It was a fun little book, but by the time it came out, Jeb was two weeks from dissolving. So that publisher was like, no, we don't want to do this again with Trump.
Trump is pretty hard to satirize isn't he? Anything you would say to satirize him is a possibility he would actually do.
That can be difficult. Throughout my life working at The Onion, people have always seen crazy things happen in the news, or some crazy personality like Trump ascend to major national prominence, and they always say, "You guys must be having a field day with this. This stuff writes itself!" Actually, that makes it really hard. If it's already funny, what are you going to do with it? With Trump, it was a matter of getting inside the guy's skin, learning who he is, and trying to do a lot character humor. He's got a lot things about him that are inherently funny, but with him it's all hyperbole. So we really turned up the heat
Were you around back when Trump tried to sue The Onion?
I was, yeah. Here's my theory on this now, in retrospect, after the John Miller/John Barron thing: Trump's lawyer did not write that letter. Trump wrote that letter. If you look at the text of it closely, he uses words like, "This article is disgraceful and disgusting, I demand an apology." We've got the humorless bluster, the demand for an apology, some of his favorite words. And if you look at the wording, too, we've got this fourth-grade level sentence structure. This is not a legal mind writing this letter. I'm very suspicious about that. After he wrote that letter, he called, because we didn't respond or apologize or anything. So he hounded us by phone. He talked to the CEO—I have to see if he remembers if it sounded like Donald Trump plugging his nose in retrospect. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he'd spend that much time trying to quiet The Onion for making fun of him.
When you started at The Onion, you were satirizing newspapers, and it's shifted more toward the web now. Do you think it's really that much worse than it was 30 years ago, the state of news and journalism in general?
Oh yeah, the media is a disaster. When we stated in '88, the main thing in journalism that was like, "Oh my God, this is the death of journalism," was USA Today. They were making it big and bright and colorful and fun and not serious. That was the big danger: the infotainmentization of the news. The Onion became this parody of USA Today. But now that problem is multiplied by a thousand. The news isn't even the news anymore. You have to dig deep to find actual news. So many times people say to me, "A lot of young people get their news from fake news now like The Daily Show. Do you think you guys affect the world at all?" And I say abso-fucking-no. Can you see how bad things have gotten since we started doing this? If anything, we're making it worse. Now people are trying to be like The Onion, with funny, cute headlines. And everyone's doing clickbait headlines, certainly. So, no, it's not good.
What do you think of other satire sites that have cropped up—The Daily Currant and things like that. They're all so terrible. And then there are all these sites where the joke is just a lie—not even a joke, just a fake headline.
Well I don't like those fake headline places. And I also don't really like when The Onion veers into that territory. I like if we're funny first, and then if we fool some people who believe it, that's great. But I don't like when it's ambiguous. All the imitators—it's truly the sincerest form of flattery. But I will often meet those people and I'll tell them: You got to do something original. Don't just copy something else that someone else is doing. If you want to succeed, in the humor business especially, you've got to be original. That's rule number one. When The Onion started, there was nobody doing a humor newspaper. I'd be delighted if all those people woke up tomorrow and said, "You know, let's parody an insurance site instead of a newspaper."
Then you've got people out there doing amazing work that's similar, but different enough that's its fresh. Reductress is amazing. David Rees is now on TV, but he used to do just some incredible parody websites. He did one that was a parody of an ad agency. And then of course there was his How to Sharpen Pencils enterprise. It's like Andy Kaufman-caliber work. There are original thinkers out there still, and I love finding those people.
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