Congratulations on your fourth Onion book and fourth best seller.
Is this the part where you start recording everything I say? I feel good about it. I’m in favor of having a best seller. That’s always been my position on it. Either we’re fooling somebody or they really like us.
Are you afraid of jumping the shark?
I live in mortal terror. Well, not mortal, semi-mortal. I imagine this guy looking at us closely for signs of the end. That’s what drives me. We’ve tried to build a system that minimizes the risk of sucking. We just pitch an ungodly number of headlines.
Did transplanting The Onion from Madison affect the paper?
We took pains not to let it affect The Onion, in terms of appearing less outsidery. We didn’t want there to be a sudden increase in the number of jokes about Tina Brown or Conde Nast or Sarah Jessica Parker. New Yorkers tend to be a pretty insular lot. When you’re in Madison, it’s easier to see there’s a whole big world out there beyond the Hudson.
Hollywood has come calling.
Basically, Miramax liked The Onion. They essentially collectively optioned The Onion brain trust for us to pitch them ideas. I guess we could pitch an Onion movie: “Area Man Poops on Horror Movie.” But so far that hasn’t happened.
You and your staff must get job offers all the time.
We get calls. It’s not like our staff has been raped by anybody. We stay here because we love it. We have more creative freedom here than we would have anywhere else.
