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NEWS > BUSINESS > THE ONION CUTTING BACK ON SATIRE, HUMOUR, RELEVANCE
THE ONION CUTTING BACK ON SATIRE, HUMOUR, RELEVANCE
March 5 2009
Chicago, IL – For more than 20 years ‘The Onion’ has been the stalwart of American satire. Thriving in times when American comedy drifted towards the gross-out and profanity laden comedy of the Eighties and Nineties, The Onion has for many been the premiere source of parody and satire in modern times. 
Originally published and distributed in Universities in the Midwest, the establishment of a The Onion website in 1996 brought the paper national and eventually international attention which the company has parlayed into ever broader ranges of satire and humour. With the continuing credit crunch, and the continuing downturn in advertising revenue, The Onion is finding itself at a crossroads and in the most peril they have been in since its founders had to subsist on onion sandwiches to survive.
“There’s little doubt that The Onion has held the mantle for satire and parody like no other comedy outlet over the past twenty years. In the Eighties the genre had fallen on very dark times with the decline of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and the heydays of writers like Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, and Joseph Heller long since past America was finding itself a largely humourless place,” said Scrape TV Humour analyst Doug Cutter. “Wit and satire had been overtaken on one extreme by self-indulgent earnestness and puerile silliness on the other. Keeping the flame alive though through all of that was The Onion. Unfortunately though those days are long past and it seems now the economic conditions are forcing them towards that realization.”
Alongside staff cuts, executives at The Onion’s national headquarters in Chicago have announced that they will also be cutting down on satire, comedy, and relevance. The decision has reportedly come with feelings of regret, fear, and obvious realization.
“What they have found is that people are just not as interested in stories about small town losers being bad at sex or some guy injured from too much partying. The world has moved beyond the small town and become global and The Onion hasn’t really kept up with the times. Really they’ve suffered in similar ways to newspapers that present actual news in that they haven’t adapted to the times and are finding themselves at the other side of relevancy,” continued Cutter. “Stories about area men doing stuff or local woman doing other things just doesn’t have the same relevance as it once did when there are wars and economic turmoil. Unfortunately the editorial staff at The Onion has decided to not adapt to the times and that is diminishing their humour. Really this decision is more of acknowledgement rather than a declaration of intent, but nonetheless.” 
Staff at The Onion’s home office, as well as their various national offices, have been directed to cease attempting to write or perform humorous or relevant stories and focus their attention on various other duties like keeping the offices clean and surfing the web for news on new Adam Sandler movies. Suffice it to say, writers for the paper are reportedly starting to look elsewhere for employment.
“With the country losing 500,000 jobs a month finding a new job is going to be difficult for anyone, never mind for writers. People who have made their living working for The Onion are at even more of a disadvantage because there just isn’t a whole lot of demand for snotty college kids who write the same thing over and over again,” continued Cutter. “Most of them are going to have to be happy surfing the web and dusting if they want to keep food on the table. Of course they could always decide to change things up and start to produce fresh and original stories with relevance and wit, but that may be asking too much.”
There is no word on what will be happening to the ubiquitous ‘Area Man’ featured in so many of the stories published by the paper though it is expected that his fate is intertwined to that of the paper and website.
“It’s a shame that ‘Area Man’ has fallen out of relevance in today’s global world but maybe that’s exactly the point. I imagine shortly we’ll be seeing a story titled something like ‘Area man murders family after losing job at Onion’. It may not be all that funny a story, but of course that’s par for the course for the paper nowadays,” continued Cutter. “Maybe they could put him to work helping to clean the offices or running to the local blockbuster to rent Adam Sandler and Chris Spade movies. It’d be shame to see him put out of work because he’s just a little too small town. It’d be a shame for all of them.”
Editors plan on cutting down on humour in both the newspaper and website version of the publication. As yet editors have not altered video broadcasts, The Onion News Network, has remained largely untouched, citing the fact that the feature has never been funny or relevant.
William Ashford, Business Correspondent
NEWS > BUSINESS > THE ONION CUTTING BACK ON SATIRE, HUMOUR, RELEVANCE
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