Poking A Dead Frog Part 11

How did your parents feel about your writing career?

In 2000, when I quit my day job as nurse's aide at a horrible county psychiatric home to work full-time at The Onion, my mom wasn't sure that it was a good idea-even though it meant I would no longer have to clean up human s.h.i.t and get punched in the face. When I moved to New York, she was like, "Oh, no! You have to move to New York?!" I'm not even complaining that my parents aren't supportive. They are proud of me-they get excited when I am on TV. But my mom is an obsessive worrier and she would rather I have a stable job like my sister who teaches Family and Consumer Sciences Education-the modern equivalent of Home Ec-at a junior high school. And my dad isn't going to read or watch something just because I wrote it. I sound bitter, but I'm not at all. My parents are great and cute. They just live in their own world centered in Spencer, Wisconsin.

I'm pretty sure none of the other writers in this book have ever worked in a county psychiatric home. What was that experience like?

There were different floors for different types of issues. There was an Alzheimer's unit. There was one guy, a former police chief, who got Alzheimer's very young. He was probably only sixty or so and in great shape. It took five of us women to put him in pajamas because he didn't know what was going on and his natural response was to fight. He would pull these tricky arm bends and foot sweeps on us. Giving him a shower was crazy. His wife would come to visit and just cry. That was sad.

The upper floors were where the real crazies were, younger people with schizophrenia and so on. These people would sometimes manage to get out for a bit, but then would be back in again after swallowing a handful of safety pins or whatever. There was one guy, thirty-five or so, who believed he was a leprechaun. He'd speak in an Irish accent and offer to grant wishes and stand on his head. I loved that he was so cla.s.sically crazy-if I had read something with that character, it would have seemed like lazy writing. And then there were just a lot of really loud, demanding crazy people who didn't like to bathe and would get violent very quickly if they wanted a soda and there wasn't any left.

The bottom floor was for elderly people with dementia. The former drunks were always the worst-they tended to get mean when they lost their minds. There were some people who'd been there long enough so that they didn't walk or talk anymore. The worst thing was that we had to spoon-feed these people pureed food. I mean, at a certain point it's time to die-if they were at home they would just stop eating. But the state rules were such that we had to give these poor people three meals and a snack a day-so they lived on and on. Some of them refused to open their mouths. You had to coax them to open their mouths so you could put the mush in. Others naturally opened up their mouths like little birdies. Then there were those who had feeding tubes.

People, make a living will!

How do you think working at the psychiatric inst.i.tute affected your comedic sensibility?

Well, I think working at a place like that makes you develop a thick skin. You deal with a lot of sad situations and annoying conditions. So I think you learn to not be emotionally affected by things as much. In that way, I think working there made me more able to make fun of "taboo" subjects. People would get so mad about Onion articles that involved certain subjects, whether it was disabled vets or dying babies or whatever. I just wasn't so emotionally attached to the subject. It's not that I don't think certain circ.u.mstances or topics were sad or wrong, but to me there's more than one emotional response beyond sadness or outrage. I can distance myself enough to see what's funny about other subjects, too.

From what you were saying earlier, high school sounds like it was far from ideal. Was your college experience in the mid-nineties, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in any way an improvement?

Madison was-is-a great city. It's a very liberal city. It has that cla.s.sic free weekly paper, Isthmus, filled with stories about lesbians and medical marijuana and public radio. The college is huge, which I loved. Freshman year you could take cla.s.ses in giant lecture halls and not have to interact with another human all day long.

These days, when I mention I went to the University of Wisconsin, people always mention the Badgers. Football was a huge deal at our college, apparently. I never went to a single game, a single tailgating party, or even watched a game on TV. It was this whole world I never interacted with the entire time I was going to school there. I guess on game days the entire neighborhood around the stadium becomes a sea of red and white, totally taken over by football fans. But I never went to that part of campus. It was all sports bars and jocks and business students living over there.

How did you come into the Onion world?

Madison is small enough that eventually I met people who worked at The Onion. I was putting these silly weird flyers up around town on the kiosks, and Joe Garden, one of the writers, called to say he liked them. Joe had been working at a liquor store on State Street, the main pedestrian street in downtown Madison. He had plastered the windows with funny hand-painted signs. One was a diagram of the brain with arrows pointing to "The Frontal Lobe," "The Backal Lobe," and "The Michelob." The Onion editor at the time, Dan Vebber [later a writer for s.p.a.ce Ghost Coast to Coast, Futurama, Daria], recruited him based on that. Joe ended up working at The Onion for close to twenty years.

So, my neighbor across the hallway went to a couple Onion writer meetings-he didn't really work out, but after a meeting he brought another one of the staff writers, Todd Hanson, over to a party I was having at my apartment. My apartment was set up like a fake museum. I called it the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue, and it was a curated collection of toilet paper stolen from around the country, presented in a very formal, very pretentious way, with an audio tour and lots of brochures.

I eventually wrote an Onion headline list and it went over well, and I was invited to come to meetings. I fit in right away.

How exactly did the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue start?

It started randomly. When I was a freshman, my friend and I would go to bars in neighboring small towns because they didn't card. We ended up getting a roll of toilet paper from each of these places and then keeping them as a "souvenir." The collection really took off when me and two of my other friends started going on road trips all over and stealing toilet paper from Graceland and MoMA [New York's Museum of Modern Art]-and labeling where it came from with a black magic marker. We collected thousands of rolls and got other people to collect toilet paper when they went abroad. We also got people to mail us rolls from weird locations. The joke, I guess, was that all the toilet paper looked the same. It was just something fun to do. When the rolls had taken over the front room of our apartment, we opened it up to the public as the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue. I started making T-shirts and brochures and calendars and getting it in guide books. In no way did I think of it as an "art project," but I guess it sort of was. It was also a way to mess with people.

The Onion is now a professional company with a large revenue and staff. But what was The Onion like when you first started contributing in 1996?

The Onion was so much smaller then. All the writers had day jobs. There were staff jobs for those who sold ads or did graphic design or whatever, but there was only one full-time staff position for a writer and another for the head editor. Maybe there was an a.s.sistant editor, too. All the writers just worked freelance for nothing-they got paid around forty dollars to come to meetings. The office was a c.r.a.ppy little place with stained carpeting and beanbag chairs. But it was really fun. It was like a club. Everyone was really invested in it. We acted like a group of friends. At that point we were still cementing the voice of the paper.

The first headline The Onion ever ran was in August 1988, and it was "Mendota Monster Mauls Madison." The piece was about Lake Mendota, which is on campus. Another early piece was headlined: "Thompson Changes t.i.tle from 'Governor' to 's.e.xecutioner,'" which was about then Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson. You know, references that only locals would care about. Everything was just sillier in the beginning, and more random: "Pen Stolen from Dorm Study Area," "Everybody's Eatin' Bread," "Angry Lumberjack Demands Hearty Breakfast."

At one point, before I worked at The Onion, they did a fake issue of the Badger Herald, which was the frattier of the two daily campus newspapers. The Herald was just riddled with errors and had all these bad single-panel cartoons. One was a drawing of a hammer and a clock, and captioned "Hammer Time." So, you know, at that time, The Onion was still expending energy on something only a small handful of UW students could even understand.

I was a "new" writer. I sort of came in at the right time-just when the writers started to get paid for their work. Right after I started, in 1996, The Onion went on the Internet, which of course was huge for increasing readership, and then we got a book deal. Everything was a big deal-when Mr. Show used a copy of The Onion as a prop in a sketch ["No Slackers," November 1996], that was the most exciting thing ever. When our first book, Our Dumb Century, went to number one on The New York Times bestsellers list in 1999, it was so thrilling.

For those first six or seven years, The Onion was very much an underground hit.

The Onion had always been sort of an underground secret. It was distributed on the streets in Madison and in a few other cities where they set up a local office to sell local ads-Denver, Milwaukee. But also people could order a subscription and they would be mailed the Madison edition. And those subscriptions became sort of an underground hit. People all over the country would get subscriptions and have them sitting around their apartments or office, and it would be a cool thing that not everyone knew about. Subscribers included comedy writers on the coasts. Older people in comedy still talk about how they know the names of all the dumb pizza and sub sandwich shops in Madison-Rocky Rococo and Big Mike's Super Subs-because of the ads in the early editions of The Onion.

When The Onion's popularity started to quickly spread, did you feel that things were going to change for you and the rest of the Onion staff?

It felt like what we were doing was important. Some of this feeling came from us being in the Midwest. We had something to prove. There was a really strong group dynamic. We were like a band. There was no system like there is now. We barely had an office. We didn't have a.s.sistants. Or interns. Or a proofreader. It's now huge, which is great. But it was smaller then.

A central part of the Onion sensibility, always, was that we were underdogs. All those early Onion stories about pot smokers and dishwashers and nerds and fat guys eating at buffets, or sad housewives buying Swiffer products, tapped into that. We made jokes about political figures and celebrities because we were not them, and then we made jokes about sad sacks because we were them. I don't think anyone in the writer's room back then had had a normal, fun childhood.

Do you feel that the paper's humor changed once it went national?

Things got a bit more clever and less silly. I think "Secondhand Smoke Linked to Secondhand Coolness" is an example of that. The humor started to be more about buzzwords in the media and more about using journalism jargon. I'm also thinking of "Clinton Takes Leave of Office to Stand in Line for Star Wars: Episode I" and "Lewinsky Subpoenaed to Re-Blow Clinton on Senate Floor." But then I think as it moved into the George W. Bush years, things started to get a little more pointed and satirical: "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'" and "Bush on North Korea: 'We Must Invade Iraq.'"

Most of The Onion's staff, not including the A.V. Club, moved to New York just before 9/11. The Onion was the first comedy outlet-including TV shows, stand-up comedians, anything or anyone-to tackle the horror of that day. Can you talk about what it was like working on that 9/11 issue?

Oh, man. The Onion writing staff had just moved to New York in January of 2001-and then in September, that happened. We were basically just settling in and getting our sea legs. It happened on a Tuesday. All the writers spent the rest of the week freaking out like everyone else. The following Monday, six days after it happened, we went in for a meeting to figure out what we were going to do for the next issue. We decided we'd do a new issue, instead of putting out a reprint issue.

Anything that we could have republished from the years-long catalog of stories just seemed stupid and inconsequential. It almost seemed more offensive to run some old story about Doritos or something. We didn't initially plan to do an all-9/11 issue, but after working on it, it just turned into that. I mean, why wouldn't it? It was all any of the writers were thinking about. We were in New York, smelling the smoke and seeing the crushingly sad photocopied "missing" posters. It was actually really great to be working and focused on something instead of just wandering around in a daze or sitting around watching the news.

We normally never cared at all if we offended anyone. If we felt we were making a point we would stand behind, we didn't care if some people didn't "get it" or didn't agree with us. In this case, though, we all really did care what people thought; we didn't want anyone to think we were being disrespectful or making light of the situation. I just wanted to make things an infinitesimal degree better by giving people a break from all the horror.

In writing that issue, there were a lot of jokes that got thrown out because they were shocking in the wrong way. I think we did a good job of weeding those out. All the staff writers wanted to do the issue except for one. It was contributing writer Joe Garden-and I can understand where he was coming from. He just thought it was wrong and thought it would be the end of The Onion. The only bad thing about working on that issue was having to travel into Manhattan every day-it was scary and depressing, a war zone. But also, it was good to be around friends at a time like that, pitching jokes to each other.

We finished the paper and sent it off to the printers. There was a two-day wait before it hit the streets and the Internet. During that time, I was so nervous, second-guessing if we did the right thing, worried how people would react. Then the issue went online and a trickle of e-mails started coming in, and then a flood. And they were 95 percent positive. On a normal week, 50 percent of the e-mails were people complaining-so this was really good. All these people were writing long, long e-mails to say "thank you" and to say how much the issue meant to them and how they cried while reading it. I was so relieved and so happy and proud.

People have said that this particular Onion issue was special not because it came out so fast but because we actually made jokes about 9/11. Other comedy outlets came back with no jokes at all or unrelated jokes.

We also wanted to avoid any headline like "Thing Everyone Knew Was Going to Happen, Finally Happens." Or a headline like "We Told You So, America!" Even though The Onion has a long history of chastising the government, we didn't want to touch on that for this particular issue. Then again, we didn't want to do a bunch of "Rah Rah U.S.A.!" flag-waving headlines, either.

You wrote a now-famous headline for the 9/11 issue that seemed to perfectly sum up the nation's mood: "Not Knowing What Else to Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake." That particular headline was mentioned in newspapers across the world. It was mentioned again and reprinted on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Were you at all surprised by the positive reaction to it?

I'm glad people liked it. Some of the stories in that issue were kind of c.o.c.ky and opinionated-if your G.o.d tells you to kill people, maybe he's not such a good G.o.d. So I'm glad some of the stories were about the sheer sadness and confusion we were feeling. We didn't feel like we totally understood what was happening.

Over the years, have you been the go-to person for any specific type of Onion story?

I wrote a lot of stories about the sad mundanity of life. Fat guys, blue-collar workers, starving Africans, emotionally needy women. You know, the stories that really don't have a lot of jokes.

I wrote one [April 1998] with the headline "My Goal Is to Someday Be a Realtor," which doesn't even have a joke. It's just ridiculing this woman for having small dreams instead of just giving up and being totally hopeless.

And yet this Realtor does seem to be content. I was reading through some of your articles again and I saw that a common theme is cheerfulness in the face of adversity.

Or in what would be my idea of h.e.l.l. Yeah, I guess so. I do like to write about characters who probably should be depressed but who, for whatever reason, find their situation okay, or even a little exciting. I wouldn't be so cheerful. I guess an example of that would be "It's Not a Crack House, It's a Crack Home" [December 3, 1996].

You've also written quite a few stories featuring female characters-usually young and nave-who might not grasp how bad their lives are about to become.

There's something particularly detestable about people who are stupid and completely wrong but still have att.i.tude. It's funny to hear these characters spout off when you know what's in store for them. I wrote columns by a recurring op-ed character named Amber Richardson, with headlines like "I Hope My Baby Doesn't Come Out All f.u.c.ked-Up and s.h.i.t" and "My Baby Don't Want No Medicine." She was a teen mom who was always railing against her "b.i.t.c.h social worker." This sixteen-year-old single mother is probably at a high point in her life, complaining about her poor social worker and ragging on her friends.

I earned a teaching degree in college. I did my student teaching at a high school in Madison for pregnant teens. It was pretty sad. A couple of the girls were smoking specifically because they had heard it would make the baby smaller-they thought it would make the labor less painful if the baby was small. One girl "stole" another girl's baby name, Rae Rae, after giving birth first. There was a lot of material that you never would have ever thought up if you were trying to write for a teen mom. You just had to hear it.

Do you see a difference now between your sensibility and the sensibility of the current, younger writers for The Onion?

I think writers for The Onion are still mostly weirdos. And The Onion's use of freelance writers contributes to that, too. There are people who can live in Michigan and submit jokes every week out of their parents' bas.e.m.e.nt.

I think there is a new thing that I've noticed where more younger people have begun to see comedy as a viable career and approach it that way. It's not that they're not funny and talented; they are, but they also go about it with a goal in mind. They know they have to work up their resume and get their foot in the door at various places. This is so foreign to the way I started and how the older comedy writers I know started. They were doing comedy because they felt like they didn't fit into the jobs they were supposed to pursue. So they did this other thing as an outlet. And then when they started to make money, it was almost surprising.

In 2013, you were hired as a writer on the TV show Community. What's the difference between writing for Community and for The Onion?

Writing for Community is, of course, very different than writing for The Onion. The show is [comedy writer and producer] Dan Harmon's show-he created and runs it. When you're writing for it, you're writing for him. At The Onion, our goal was to maintain the consistency of the "Onion voice." Because it was this collective thing, and there was no single creator, we could argue endlessly about what was in the Onion voice and what wasn't. The whole process was very democratic-in both good and bad ways.

The Onion voice at its best is rather cold and stiff and clinical, which I suppose is why the hive-mind system works so well. Community, on the other hand, is a very warm show, and that's because of Dan Harmon and his love for his characters. People who don't watch it sometimes have the misconception that Community is all genre parody and pop culture references-I myself made that mistake before I actually saw it. But the genius of Community is that even within those genre-joke episodes it never sells out its characters or abandons the emotionality of the story.

Dan Harmon, who began his career as an improv performer in Milwaukee and then began writing for TV in 1999, is notorious for breaking down the plots and storylines in a very a.n.a.lytical way.

Dan has a method for breaking stories, a modified version of the hero's journey. The character leaves his zone of comfort, has a road of trials, and returns home having changed. It's physically represented with a circle divided into four parts. We use these circles each time we're working on a specific story. We spend all day drawing them on the dry-erase boards, marking them up, erasing them, drawing new ones. I literally see these circles in my sleep. Last night, I was dreaming about a vacation I'm about to take, and in my dream I was using Dan Harmon's circle to figure out what I should do on the trip. This system is a great way to make sure that your stories aren't too plotty and linear. It helps you wrestle endless options into an emotionally meaningful story. I will definitely use it whenever I write something from now on. I'm learning a lot from Dan.1 As someone who's achieved her dream of becoming a successful professional comedy writer, do you now consider yourself a happy person?

For me, writing comedy is about being unhappy. It's about being unhappy with the way things are, and wanting to write something that is critical of those things, but in a way that isn't so self-serious. Or it's about being on the outside of something a bit, feeling left out, and needing to create your own fun. Or wanting to create something that excludes other people-the people who don't get it-in order to circle the wagons a bit around people who are like you. I think if you are happy and fit in, you have little reason to develop a sense of humor. There are always exceptions, but swimsuit models and Wall Street dudes aren't funny. They have no reason to question the world. It's working for them. Life is sweet, bro!

I'm not actually an unhappy person. I'm not one of those angry or depressed comedy writers. I just think I am distrustful of the world and of accepting things at face value, and I guess that's a result of my childhood.

I think things have to be better for kids these days simply because of the Internet. I'm just talking about weird, shy kids wearing the wrong jeans, not kids who are molested by their gym teachers or have degenerative bone disorders or who are getting shot at. They're just f.u.c.ked. But these days, slightly different kids can find other people with their interests. It must help them feel like they're not total freaks.

Then again, maybe it's a bad thing. I think young writers feel more ent.i.tled to be published now than ever before: "I can publish on my blog. Why won't The New Yorker publish me?"

At the very least, I think comedy can help misfits cope. It's not for everyone, so it becomes a place for someone to fit in, either as a consumer or as a maker of comedy. Any area of interest can help someone achieve that sense of community, whether it's astronomy or a particular style of comedy. But comedy is better because it makes you laugh and it physically works those underdeveloped nerd stomach muscles.

What advice would you have for those high school or college students wanting to develop those underdeveloped nerd muscles?

As far as specific advice for those wanting to get into comedy writing, do a bunch of stuff for free. Even if you live in some G.o.dforsaken h.e.l.lhole. There are so many blogs out there and humor websites, as well as people who act or produce and need scripts. Writing for free will make you write a lot, which is the only way to become a better writer. Everyone knows that reading a book about how to write comedy is a big joke. You just have to do it.

College kids used to show me their versions of The Onion-often called something like The Scallion or The Bunion-and they'd want me to be impressed. But it was hard; I was already doing The Onion. What could I say? I mean, now The Onion is a format, but years ago, The Onion was created and developed by a bunch of college kids. The Bunion staff would be better off doing something new. So take a two-p.r.o.ng approach-learn how to write for other people but also, in a separate project, find an original voice.

Another thing: If you want to write comedy, I think that you shouldn't watch too much comedy. I think you start to rely too much on other people to tell you what's funny and ridiculous. You become needy for comment. Or else you start to feel that everything has already been done and you inadvertently close yourself off to having an honest and funny reaction to things. This might be bulls.h.i.t because I do know a lot of comedy writers who are big fans of comedy and who watch a ton of it. But I also know a lot of comedy writers who tell funny stories as opposed to retelling jokes. It just gets annoying when there are five public figures everyone is making jokes about, and the jokes start to take on the same cadence.

So keep writing for free and then almost free, and then after a while, if you are good, you will rise to the top. Good writers are actually in demand. If you are not good, well, you will hopefully start to enjoy your day job as a web designer at an Internet company that sells moderately priced, fashion-forward men's pants. It's a win-win.

ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE.

WILL TRACY.

Editor in Chief, The Onion

Choosing Headlines at The Onion

Each week, the staff of The Onion reads an average of fifteen hundred headlines that arrive on Monday morning from both regular contributors and freelancers. Now, that's a lot of G.o.dd.a.m.n jokes. It's really more jokes than the human brain is able to reasonably and intelligently process within the span of five days. Only a handful of jokes are truly funny and exceptional enough to break through the benumbed haze of our writers' room and see the light of day. The rest, meanwhile, are immediately thrown onto the corpse pile and, like my high school years, never spoken of again.

I have chosen nine rejected jokes from a recent Monday headline list and specified the reason why each joke, ultimately, was not picked. The individual reasons why these jokes were not picked tend to come up over and over again. We are constantly repeating the same death sentences about how a joke is "too this" or "too that." This is how you develop consistency as a joke writer, but this is also how-slowly but surely-you begin to lose your mind.

I have also included five jokes and why they were picked.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Next Quentin Tarantino Movie to Offer Slick, Stylish Take on Rwandan Genocide I could see how this would be written out, and we could probably come up with some funny casting choices and an amusing description of the film's story, as well as a realistic-looking poster. But it just feels like the obvious joke to make about Tarantino at this point. Even though it might be a popular story for us to do, it would be popular because it's telling people, essentially, a joke they've already heard before.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Nation's Environmental Experts Quietly Moving Families Inland Here's something that happens to us, depressingly, quite often . . . we've already done this joke. "Nation's Economists Quietly Evacuating Their Families" [August 12, 2012]. Hence, we killed this immediately. We have over twenty years' worth of these headlines, so the chances of doing a joke we haven't done before grows a little slimmer with each pa.s.sing day.

REJECTED HEADLINE: NonTime Traveler Warns Humanity of Dystopian Present Here is a similar, yet different problem for us: Someone else has already done this joke. It was on McSweeney's ["It's Difficult Convincing Time Travelers That the Present Day Is Not a Dystopia," by David Henne, January 3, 2011]. We generally kill any joke that is similar to another comedy outlet's joke. The most common joke-killer, by far, is The Simpsons, because they've already made every joke ever. Mr. Show comes up, too, and, occasionally, The Colbert Report.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Study: Majority of Americans Covered in Layer of Crumbs This is a halfway-decent joke, and not one we've made before, exactly, but it's part of a genre of jokes that we've just made too many of recently. Sometimes we hit a certain genre too often and need to take a break. We've opted to take a break from writing about overeating Americans for a bit, although, I'm sure, not for too long.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Parents Who Spend Every Waking Moment in Anguish Proud Son Is Serving His Country This appears to be an interesting juxtaposition and comment, but ultimately, it's not enough of an escalation of reality. It just reads as too real. Also, feeling anguish over your son serving in the armed forces overseas is not necessarily a mutually exclusive feeling from being proud that your son is serving his country. I'm sure many military parents openly hold both opinions at the same time, and feel no conflict in doing so. It feels like a toothless piece of satire.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Instagram Photo Very Unique, Sources Agree This would be a popular story, but, like the Tarantino joke, it's the joke that everyone is making. We look pretty stupid when we make the same basic joke that everyone else is making, because we have a reputation for doing the opposite. The Onion has a long history of snidely pointing out how everyone is making the same point. We're jerks in that sense.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Area Man Stocking Up on Computers for Impending Cyber-War Something about this still amuses me-I like the idea of someone physically stockpiling computers like they're rifles or something. But it's just too odd, and the logic doesn't actually hold. It's the kind of joke we talk about for a few minutes in the room until the question of "How would you actually write this?" is posed, and then we drop it and move on.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Chuck E. Cheese's Costume Only Halfway Off Before Screaming at Eight-Year-Old Daughter I'm not a fan of this joke. It's just too easy, and too constructed. You can see the thought process of the writer, thinking, I'm going to take an upsetting situation (a man yelling at his daughter) and then juxtapose it with an easy, go-to example of something silly and harmless (the Chuck E. Cheese's costume). But it has no basis in reality. It's a situation that exists only in Comedy Writer Land.

REJECTED HEADLINE: Only Way to Prevent Gorilla Attacks Is Bigger Gorillas Everywhere, Says NRA Head This one was not technically a reject, per se, as it led to a reworded headline using the same concept. The gun control joke was, I felt, too convoluted and too jokey. It seemed to parallel the real-life headlines I was seeing. The writers' and editors' room batted around a few rewordings and came up with "Gorilla Sales Skyrocket after Latest Gorilla Attack" [January 10, 2013], which just reads cleaner and sharper. A lot of headlines are submitted to a similar brand of torture.

And now for five jokes and why they were chosen as headlines: Ten-Year-Old Wishes Unemployed Father Couldn't Make It to Just One of His Little League Games It's a switch I haven't seen before. There is something really elegant and satisfying about a headline that looks almost exactly like its real-world antecedent, the only difference being the addition or subtraction of a few key letters here and there, and suddenly the meaning becomes completely different. And yet, there is still a logic in place that completely holds. We all know the cliche of the busy, careerist father who can't make it to his son's Little League game, but anyone who has ever played Little League is just as familiar with the somewhat pathetic, embarra.s.sing father who is way, way too into the game because he may not have much else in his life at that point. To me, that's a perfectly clean switch.

Film Character Moves into Beautiful Brooklyn Brownstone after Getting Dream Publishing Job This is sort of a mini-genre within The Onion, wherein we report on a movie or television reality in our dry editorial voice as though it were actual reality. The subtext generally being that the reality presented in movies and television is just utter, lying horses.h.i.t. Most of our writers are thoroughly-perhaps unhealthily-pop culture literate, so it is generally fairly easy for us to get into this world, inhabit it, and, in so doing, expose exactly what is manipulative and false about these narratives we are fed over and over again. Also, there is always a slight warmth to these pieces, because I think a lot of our writers have an inherent nerdish fondness for bad, junky movies.

Report: Chinese Third Graders Falling Behind U.S. High School Students in Science, Math I was unsure about this one at first because, while it's a cleverly worded joke, I wasn't sure the story itself would have legs. I also worried the joke might be more "clever" than funny. Ultimately, though, I think it's good for an issue of The Onion, or a week's worth of content, to have a certain ratio of smart to silly, and this is just a solid satirical joke. It is all couched in this very official "report" language, as though this were an alarming, surprising trend. It looks just like a news headline, which helps, and it calls up so much unspoken subtext for the reader to think about: the state of the U.S. education system, the rise of China, the economic realities that await both countries. And yet you don't have to come out and say any of that; it's all perfectly implied by the perspective of the joke.

Torrent of Soap Issues from Wildly Unexpected Part of Dispenser This is another entry in the cherished Onion subgenre of Small Made Big, in which we take the must prosaic, insignificant, ordinary event that could ever occur and report on it as though it were huge, breaking, front-page news. "Rubber Band Needed" is another entry in this genre. I like this one in particular because the language in the headline is so heightened, so dramatic. And I immediately smile when I see a headline like this-something so incredibly minor-and then see that there are f.u.c.king eight hundred words of text beneath it. Overkill like that makes me laugh.

Robert Mapplethorpe Children's Museum Celebrates Grand Opening Sometimes just the thought of what the finished Photoshopped graphic will look like is enough to sell me.

PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE.