Jan. 20--Let's try tackling this purchase of The Onion by Univision in a few Onion-style headlines (while simultaneously demonstrating that Onion-style headlines are hard to write):
Plucky Business Confident Conglomerate Taking It Over Really Won't Change a Thing
Onion Writer Who No Longer Lives in Brooklyn Vows to Draw the Line at Miami Freaking Florida
Panic at A.V. Club: Staffers Terrified New Univision Bosses Will Discover Their Site Isn't Funny
Right now, Univision Communications, the owner of the Spanish-language television network based primarily in South Florida, is making all the standard avowals about its purchase of a controlling interest in The Onion, the college-town humor paper turned national comedy brand. It'll stay in Chicago, rather than having to move to Miami. Univision wants to add The Onion's seasoning to its corporate mix, not change its recipe. Univision loves jokes and wants jokes because jokes speak to millennials.
Maybe. Maybe. Just maybe the site that is Chicago's best-known resident national entertainment player -- it moved here from New York in 2012, right after Oprah left town -- will get to keep things going the way they have been.
But count me skeptical. Let Onion writers make another Quvenzhane Wallis-style mistake -- calling the child actor a very bad word while trying to be funny in a 2013 Oscar-night tweet -- and see how long the corporate hands stay off. Let ClickHole, The Onion's parody of viral content websites, have a down quarter, or lose sponsorship, and count the days until the tinkering starts.
Inevitably, corporate ownership changes things, and not just in the potentially positive ways that Onion President Mike McAvoy cited in telling staff about the sale. Yes, there might be more money to develop new things and take bigger swings. But with few exceptions, the bigger the company, the thicker the layers of bureaucracy and the more risk averse it becomes.
This is too bad, because Onion has been on a roll. Its flagship site, now wholly dedicated to digital publication, churns out a lot more headlines than it used to. It reacts quickly to the news, or to the gossip, and the batting average remains remarkably high. "34-Year-Old Man May As Well Keep Pursuing Dream At This Point," said a Tuesday-morning headline demonstrating the site still satirizes quotidian life, too.
It uses a standing headline and story whenever there's a new mass shooting in the U.S., a very high-concept, yet very pointed response: " 'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens," it reads, right above a dateline that changes according to the mass-murder location.
ClickHole is the younger sister site that mocks the likes of Buzzfeed and other sites that employ listicles to chase Internet virality, and it is both battle-sword sharp and gloriously inane. "16 Pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. Sprinting Through Times Square," promised a holiday-themed ClickHole feature.
StarWipe, a newer site aiming more directly at celebrity gossip, is always worth a check, too. A.V. Club, the more straight-faced arts and entertainment site, survived a group departure of key staffers almost three years ago. It remains keen-eyed in its own observations and the host to reader commentary that will restore the faith in humanity you lose whenever you mistakenly read a few YouTube comments.
And late last year, The Onion brought out in paperback the funniest book it has yet made, which is saying something. "The Onion Magazine: The Iconic Covers that Transformed an Undeserving World" may be the book coffee tables were built to hold. It collects one of the great, undernoticed features of the website, its Sunday magazine cover parodies. I'd quote one, but the headlines without the cover graphics are only half the joke, and the covers grow in potency as you look at one after another. Individually, they're funny; collectively, they will bring you to the kind of laughter that seems to live outside of your conscious brain.
Onion needs to be able to keep doing things like that, devoting staff time to satirizing Sunday newspaper magazines such as Parade long after Parade's cultural impact has faded. It needs to be able to mess up, as in crossing the line with a child actress, because the occasional miscalculation of what the audience will tolerate is what happens when you try to be very funny rather than just pretty funny.
Let's hope Univision is different than the legions of new bosses who have been unable to resist guiding their new properties toward things such as efficiency and good taste. But let's also remember that the key term in "controlling interest" is almost never "interest."
sajohnson@tribpub.com
