In honor of what I call Onion-day - known to the rest of the world simply as Wednesday - I decided to throw this interview in to the continuing series. This is a short chat with Rob Siegal, editor in chief of The Onion. Now, I know that Mr. Siegal isn’t a stand-up comedian (though he has done stand-up in the past), if we broaden the focus to just "humor," then no one can deny the inclusion of The Onion (come to think about it, Jack Black and Kyle Gass aren’t stand-ups either, so I’ve already broken the imaginary rule).

There’s probably no one that reads this board that doesn’t also log on to theonion.com religiously, and if there is, well then, they’re a humorless fuck who should shuffle back to the Torch or something (this ends my hard-hitting wrestling commentary for the day. Thanks!). For my money, "Our Dumb Century" is probably the funniest book ever published, just a complete and utter masterpiece, a work of art that alone secures The Onion’s place in comedy history. But more than that, The Onion has a level of being consistently funny that has probably never been matched in printed form, not to mention rivaling MST3K or Mr. Show for consistency of performance (and least you need reminding, those ventures have both purchased their respective farms). The post-September 11 issue (heretofore known as the "Holy Fucking Shit" issue) alone should erase any doubts about the strength of The Onion’s efforts, even after moving from Madison to the Big Apple.

Enough rambling.
Enjoy!

(Mul)Doomstone: Why should anyone buy your book?

Rob Siegal: Is that "Justify Your Existence" [ a recurring feature in The Onion’s A.V. Club section]?

(M)DS: Yeah.

RS: Very clever. I’ve never had anyone turn that on me. That’s the A.V. Club section, you can’t turn that on me! Uhhh . . . because it’s fuckin’ hilarious, and, uhhhhh . . . it’s America’s . . . man, that question is harder than it looks. It’s no fun when it’s done to me. Ummmm, because it’s the funniest book of the year, that’s why.

(M)DS: Do you think your book will help people?

RS: Will it help people? Yeah. Yeah, I think it’ll brighten their day.

(M)DS: Well, I wanted to start the interview off by ripping off The Onion, as a sort of confession. Because we do some fake news stories for this paper on occasion, and they’re all just totally, completely ripping off The Onion. But they’re not half as funny. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

RS: It is a lot harder than it looks.

(M)DS: Does it bother you or are you even aware that it happens?

RS: People send that stuff to us. A reader in, like, Tacoma, Washington will send something to us and say, "Hey, look! They’re ripping you off!" We’re aware of a lot of Onion-style things that are popping up all over the place. I think there’s one called "The Beet" and there’s one called "The Radish" - I think that one’s in L.A. We just take it as a sign of success, you know? I mean, "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" has their "Greed", and the Backstreet Boys have ‘N Sync, so when you’re successful, there’s an imitator, I suppose. We’re The Beatles and they’re The Monkees.

(M)DS: Do you ever worry people will forget who are The Beatles and who are The Monkees?

RS: Not really. It took us eleven years to get this far, we’ve been doing this since 1988, so we’ve got a pretty good head start. We’re pretty well known so any paper that starts doing fake news hears pretty quickly that they’re just considered an Onion ripoff.

(M)DS: How long have you been at The Onion?

RS: Five years, going on six years. I started in 1995.

(M)DS: How did it come about for you?

RS: Well, as so many people do, you grow up in a small town like New York City, and then you move to Madison, Wisconsin to make it big in the world of entertainment.

(M)DS: There was some work done once on an Onion TV show that didn’t pan out. Do you worry about quality control the bigger you get?

RS: It’s hard. I mean, we have a relatively small staff and I like everything to run through me, which makes it hard to do some of the other things that we’d like to do. We get offers to pitch a TV pilot or a movie or whatever, but unfortunately we have to put out forty-seven goddamn issues of this paper every year and we just can’t. As we expand, it will be tricky to maintain, to keep a tight grip on all of these things.

(M)DS: Do you ever worry that ten years in the future we could see something like "The Onion’s European Vacation"?

RS: We joke about that. We have one, "The Onion Presents Up the Academy!" It’s a snobs versus slobs story set in a snooty private university. Ted Knight is dead, right?

(M)DS: Yeah, I think so.

RS: Yeah, we were hoping to cast him. But there will be stuffy people wearing ascots and they will fall on to pools. In Onion-movies, the bad guy is always defeated by getting wet.

(M)DS: Any villain can be felled by a little moisture.

RS: Yeah, it’s a great tradition of the late seventies and early eighties that we would like to revive.

(M)DS: The rumor I hear is that if there is someone The Onion is interested in adding to their writing team, they ask them to write some ungodly huge amount of funny stories in some ungodly small amount of time, and in the end most of them just fold.

RS: Is that the legend?

(M)DS: That’s the legend.

RS: No, we . . . we’re not that . . . we just . . .

(M)DS: It’s a pretty good legend.

RS: Yeah, you’re right. Let’s just say it’s true. It’s better than the truth.

(M)DS: How did you decide on what to put into this "best of" book?

RS: Well, we’re going to do more of these so we didn’t stress out too much. It’s labeled "Volume One," so hopefully we can put one of these together every year. This is only the beginning of the merchandising, the selling out of The Onion, the attempt to put out old crap and pawn it off as new. We did so much work on "Our Dumb Century" that we just decided to coast on this one.

(M)DS: Is there anything that you wouldn’t make a joke about?

RS: Probably you, because not that many people would get it. I mean, you’re not really that well known throughout the country.

(M)DS: True. But what I’m getting at is, The Onion was there right after Columbine, The Onion was there right after JFK Jr. . . .

RS: Right after Princess Di, after Mother Theresa, yeah. We’re on the spot with the news that other people shy away from. There is no topic that we will shy away from so long as we have an intelligent take on the topic and have something funny to say about it. We’re not just assholes, though, you know? We don’t want to be like, "Hey, isn’t it funny that all these people died," you know?

(M)DS: What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your life?

RS: Man . . . The Challenger, I guess.