The Time I Briefly Clung To The Bottom Millimeter Of The Bottom Rung Of ‘The Onion’

On being sad, but funny, but not quite funny enough (now unlocked)

Calling me “half-baked” in college would be an overstatement. I probably wasn’t even quarter-baked. I had yet to figure a lot of stuff out, I didn’t make the most of the opportunities college presents, and in many ways, albeit with some noteworthy exceptions, my four years at Brandeis and the University of Michigan were rather forgettable.

What I did know was that I liked to write. So I wrote a lot — at both schools I was a columnist for the primarily daily student paper. And as soon as I arrived in Michigan for my junior year, having transferred from Brandeis, I applied to write for The Michigan Every Three Weekly by sending in some sample headlines (and probably fully written articles, too — I can’t remember).

The E3W was the flashier, hipper upstart of the two humor publications I was aware of at Michigan. The other was The Gargoyle, which was something of an old-school Lampoon-ish magazine and whose most famous alum is Arthur Miller, while the Every Three Weekly — that’s a play on The Michigan Daily, the student daily — was simply and unapologetically a clone of The Onion.

There was a bit of a rivalry between the two. The Garg had been around forever and was seen by E3W staffers as a bit lamer and fustier, while the E3W was more of the new kid on the block, having only begun regular publication (according to Wikipedia) in 1999. The E3W probably benefited from the fact that, thanks to the internet, this was also around the time The Onion started getting national recognition.

I loved The Onion, in part because my parents — probably my mom — had bought us Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source while I was in high school. It’s simply a book imagining if The Onion had been around for the last hundred years, and it’s absolutely brilliant. Having a copy of it in my house was a life-changing event.

While I don’t have a copy with me in New York —something I should fix, pronto — the headlines touted on the Amazon page, which are sprawled across different eras, nicely capture the level of brilliance we’re dealing with here:

A New Century Dawns! McKinley Ushers in Bold New “Coal Age”

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria Boasts: “No Man Can Stop Me”

AWESOME! Nation Wowed by Tremendous Hindenburg Explosion

Martin Luther King: “I Had a Really Weird Dream Last Night”

Clinton Denies Lewinsky Allegations: “We Did Not Have Sex, We Made Love,” He Says

That being said, I’m not sure any of these match perhaps the most legendary headline in Onion history: “HOLY SHIT: MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON.” That alone would be worth the price of the book, especially in the pre-broadband age — dayenu — but of course with The Onion’s writers there’s always more. On that same fake front page we also get Neil Armstrong’s parallel-universe first words: “HOLY LIVING FUCK.” And tucked in the corner, noticeable only to the true superfans, an accompanying editorial nestled perfectly into the 1969 context: “WE CAN PUT A MAN ON THE MOON, BUT WE CAN’T BOMB A TINY ASIAN NATION INTO THE STONE AGE?”

I was obsessed with The Onion and would have done anything to be involved with any organization with even the most tangential connection to it. And the E3W was an accessible, campus version of The Onion that was itself quite funny.

I don’t have a lot of good, vivid memories of my mom — it’s sad but unsurprising given the circumstances and my terrible memory for interpersonal interactions in general — but one of them concerns the E3W. It felt like it took forever to hear back from the paper about whether I could join. One of my first trips home — likely Thanksgiving or winter break my junior year — I was very sad. I can’t remember why, but maybe I just felt like my college years were melting away a little, and here I was at a new place, but nothing felt that different. Either way, I remember my mom just sort of hugging me and holding me as I sat at our dining room table. 

In the version lodged in my brain, it’s actually during this interaction that I get an email informing me that yes, I had made the cut to become an E3W staffer, meaning my application packet was good enough, meaning for the first time ever someone who wasn’t a friend or family member, and whose opinion I respected, had declared me Officially Funny (Enough).

In reality, this can’t have been what happened. I almost certainly didn’t have a laptop back then, and would actually lug my desktop computer back and forth between Ann Arbor and Boston for work purposes (and, if we’re being honest, gaming — this was the era of Half-Life 2, after all). Yet I do think that 1) I was sad when I got home; 2) my mom comforted me in the way I remember; and 3) I found out not long after that I had been accepted to the E3W. This must have been a major salve — whatever else happened when I got back to Ann Arbor, there’d be this exciting new opportunity waiting for me. Even if I were still sad, I could distract myself by making up fake headlines that might even get into a real-life student paper. 

So I returned to Ann Arbor and started my new life as an E3W staffer. By then I also wrote for The Gargoyle. The rivalry between the Garg and the E3W wasn’t exactly Bloods vs. Crips, so other than some lighthearted ribbing no one really cared that I wrote for both. At The Gargoyle I simply penned whatever random garbage I wanted, including in a regular feature in the back of the magazine with the unforgivable title “Singal’s Thingals.” I think I have some very old issues back in Mass, and if and when I find them I’ll post some of my, uh, output. 

At The Every Three Weekly, our efforts were a bit more structured: it was all fake headlines and news articles, all the time. The exceptionally highbrow contributions that I successfully got into the paper include “Drunk Clubber Unsure Which Bush Twin He Just Made Out With” and “Organic Chemistry Professor Retires to Spend More Time with Bisphosphoglycerate.” There was also “I Swear To God That Tree Just Fucking Moved,” with the byline listed as “A Freshman Smoking Pot for the First Time.” I found all those from an old email that included a link to that edition of the paper, apparently January of 2005, but alas, it’s now dead. (I guess I should include a caveat here: I strongly believe these were my headlines, but it was almost 20 years ago, there were no bylines on these articles, I don’t have the original emails, and memory is a jerk.)

I got my headlines and articles into the paper pretty regularly, if memory serves, which was nice. I felt like even though there were a lot of funny people on staff, I could hang. I honestly don’t have a lot of other memories of the day-to-day of working for the paper other than a couple faint recollections of drunken parties, and of staff meetings where we all engaged in fast-paced arms races to be as offensive as possible. Let’s just say that some circa-2006 stories in the E3W would……………………. not hold up to certain standards about Subjects You Are Not Supposed To Joke About. Let’s leave it at that. Can we please leave it at that?

The story really picks up my senior year. The Onion — the real life freakin’ ONION — reached out to certain campus humor publications, the E3W included, and invited us to apply to a fellowship. Whoever got it would move to New York after graduation and work for the actual Onion. They’d be at the bottom of the totem pole but would have a chance to contribute.

I was really, really hoping I still had my application somewhere. I wanted to see the headlines I sent in. Alas, I don’t appear to.

What I do have, because I forwarded it to my present email address at the time, is an insanely exciting email I received from Chet Clem, editorial director of The Onion:

Jesse,

Thank you for applying for a writing fellowship with The Onion this
summer. After reviewing all of the applicants we decided you weren’t the best fit for this position. However, we were impressed with the headlines you submitted and would like to invite you to be a freelance headline contributor for The Onion. In fact, we'd like to pay you $50 (our standard freelance rate) and run one of your headlines (Clooney Scouting Locations For Darfur-Based Romantic Comedy) next week. Please give me a call (212-xxx-xxxx ext. 248) or drop me an email to confirm that this is OK.

All the best,
Chet

DUDE!!!! I didn’t get the fellowship, but an offensive headline I wrote about George Clooney’s awareness and fundraising work in Darfur was going to appear in the actual, real-life Onion? Insane. And the freelance headline contributor gig was cool, too — every week I could send in a fresh batch of headlines, and if they were good, The Onion would use them and pay me even more fifty dollarses!

One of the fellowship slots did go to an E3W staffer — Megan Ganz, our editor-in-chief. If you’re a TV nerd, you might recognize the name, but if you don’t, she’s having a ridiculously successful career writing for shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Modern Family, and Community. So The Onion really helped launch her amazing places.

It’s impossible, in a situation where you came in second(ish) place and first prize was an amazing opportunity, not to wonder what would have happened if things had gone differently. I do wonder about what would have happened if I’d gotten that gig. But not too much, to be honest, because it turns out there are a lot of people out there who are much funnier than I am — or at least more consistently funny.

I know this because of how poorly I fared once I was actually competing with other wannabe professional funny people. The process would work like this: Every week each of us hangers-on sent in 25 sample headlines. Later on in the week The Onion sent out an email with the subject line “Contributor Headline Ideas” with all the headlines the editorial staff had decided were funny enough to maybe go in the paper eventually (though most of these wouldn’t ultimately make the cut either). These days, The Onion appears to list all its “headline contributors” by name, but that wasn’t the case when I was sending in headlines. Back then, only by proving yourself as a headline contributor could you get listed as a “Contributing Writer” (I think that’s what the role was called) on the masthead, which seemed like a dream come true.

When The Onion sent out the weekly contributor headline ideas emails, each headline had the submitter’s initials next to it. There were very few JSs in these emails, because the vast majority of my headlines were rejected in favor of other, generally funnier ones. 

Here’s a selection from the 5/15/2006 list of promising headlines. OE means “op-ed,” and I’m deleting all the initials except for my own, because it’s 2023 and it wouldn’t shock me if someone got fired over a never-published Onion headline from 17 years ago.

3.   Visit To Google Earth Reveals House Is On Fire 

4.   American Idol Contestant Really Connects With Viewers By Singing
While Seated On Stool 

5.   Man Wins 12-Year Bout With College 

6.   Kid Being Made Fun Of At School Because Backpack’s Wheels Are Too
Squeaky 

7.   Final Episode Of Will And Grace Ends 9-Year Truce Between Gay And
Straight Community 

8.   Big Red Street Team Member Only Has To Give Away 50,000 More Sticks
Of Gum Before He Can Go Home 

9.   John [sic] Lovitz Says Income From Subway Commercials Allows Him A
Certain Creative Freedom 

10.  STAT: How Are We Spending Our Lunch Hour?

11.  Anthill Lays Off 9500 

12.  Child Reassured Most Monsters Do Not Exist

13.  Desperate Attempt To Cram Two Years Of Dental Hygiene Into Five Months Wholly Unsuccessful 

. . . 

36.  OE: When We Have Children, They’re Going To Love Radiohead <JS>

37.  Stranger At Supermarket Explains His Avocado Selection Method <JS>

38.  OE: No Way I’m Saving That Guy. By Jesus Christ <JS>

39.  Nation’s Grandmothers Swept Up In Textile Messaging Craze 

40.  Thousands Feared Born In Nigerian Population Explosion 

The Jesus one actually got in, as did the ha-ha-isn’t-genocide-funny headline about George Clooney I submitted as part of my fellowship. (Some headlines, like the Clooney one, end up just being headlines, while others, like the Jesus one, get written up as full articles. At our level we didn’t do any of the article writing — that was left to Onion staffers and possibly higher-level freelancers.)

But that was it — I had only two headlines published, ever. And every week I was presented with ironclad evidence that there were a lot of people out there who were way funnier than I was. These emails — which, again, consisted mostly of headlines that weren’t good enough to get into The Onion written by the bottom-tier hangers-on — were really funny. A ton of them made me chuckle as I revisited these emails:

Guy In Back of Cop Car Keeping Eye Out For Lawyer Billboard

Brilliant Scientist Desperately Trying To Get Word Out About Penis Enlargement Breakthrough

Marriage Counselor Winks Every Time Someone Mentions Sex

German Parents’ Affection Administered With Astonishing Precision

One of my favorite Onion headlines of all time never actually ran in The Onion, in fact. I can’t find it in my old emails, but one of the contributors proposed a cover for The Onion’s fake weekly magazine that went something very close to this: “MY Martha’s Vineyard (by Osama Bin Laden).” Imagine OBM lounging on a dock in summer wear and sandals.

Over time, my weekly contributions dropped off — I simply didn’t send in my 25 proposed headlines. I don’t really know what happened and I’m still (gently) kicking myself about it. It’s not as though I didn’t have time. This was my early twenties and I wasn’t exactly grinding. I was just sort of floating around, doing unpaid and lower-paid editorial internships in Washington and New York. I absolutely should have recognized that even though I didn’t seem to be getting a lot of headlines onto the Promising list, you never know! It was an amazing and sought-after opportunity to have even a pinky toe in the door at The Onion, and while the end result (not even a bottom-rung affiliation with The Onion) was probably inevitable, why hasten your own exit by not even trying? 

So if I could do it again, I absolutely would have set aside some time every week to come up with a list of 50 headlines and then culled it down to 25 by nagging my friends into giving me feedback. That’s what any smart person would have done, and I bet a lot of my competitors were doing that. Or maybe they were just a lot funnier than I was — not everyone can be Megan Ganz.

Humor is different from (say) playing in the NBA. It’s astonishingly obvious I never could have been Jayson Tatum (go Celtics). But for those of us who are pretty funny, it’s easy to look at people who are really funny — professionally funny — and say “I could do that.” I can make people laugh! I can write funny things! But at the upper tiers things are pretty different. Getting paid to be funny with any regularity, let alone doing it for a living, requires a level of consistency, prolificness, and dedication most of us can’t muster, including those of us who are capable of amateur funniness. It’s one thing to come up with 100 headlines, 10% of which The Onion considers funny enough to put on a list of promising ones; it’s quite another to be so funny, so often, that The Onion is publishing your contributions every week, or close to it.

So it’s a bit of a copout for me to say “Well, I didn’t really try!” I have no real reason to think if I had tried, the result would have been any different, even if a small part of me will always wonder. In the meantime, I’m lucky to have outlets for my dumb jokes, even if they’re not really what’s paying the bills.

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Questions? Comments? Fake headlines? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. The lead photo is a group shot of the staff of The Gargoyle I found online. Can you tell which one is me without checking?