Not Necessarily the News

MADISON, Wis. — In exchange for great pay, TV comedy writers face one giant occupational hazard--the inability to say whatever they want. Go ahead and bemoan how cruddy sitcoms are, but you try writing something genuinely funny with the network notes and the advertisers and the star egos to contend with. Interviewed recently on National Public Radio, Alan Ball noted that much of the juicy vitriol in his Golden Globe-nominated screenplay for "American Beauty" grew out of the frustration he was feeling as a comedy writer in a far more confining context--on the sitcoms "Grace Under Fire" and "Cybill."

Is it any wonder then, that some of the most daring and incisive humor originates these days far from the TV factories of New York or L.A., on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in the shadows of the Wisconsin Capitol? Here, six writers make their voices heard via old-fashioned newsprint and the newfangled Internet. They each earn around $25,000 a year--which, in left-leaning Madison, is more than enough to lead a relatively fulfilling life of intense self-hatred, depression and good Indian food.

"If we were on TV we'd be canceled," says Rob Siegel, editor of the Onion. He says this with a certain prideful relish: The Onion doesn't have TV-sized ratings, but at the Onion the writer is king. One is a former dishwasher, another an ex-liquor store clerk. The paper's senior writer is also the curator of the Museum of Bathroom Tissue, which she runs out of her Madison apartment (strictly on a volunteer basis).

They are people, in other words, who came to professional comedy writing organically--without an agent, without ever doing lunch. Together, they create the weekly newspaper the Onion, a straight-faced satire of USA Today, complete with national and world news, colorful charts, man-on-the-street interviews, trend stories and local news. What began humbly, as an underground goof, today has an audience in the neighborhood of 1 million people, including 520,000 visitors per week to the Web site alone. The former dishwasher and the liquor store clerk and the toilet paper museum curator are these days much admired in Hollywood comedy circles. They are also the winner of the 1999 Thurber Prize for American Humor and the best-selling co-authors of the 1999 humor book "Our Dumb Century," which re-imagined the 20th century with the Onion as the newspaper of record, reporting on such landmark events as the sinking of the Titanic ("World's Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg") and the JFK as sassination ("Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons").