The Onion: A Tough Room

Like many of you on the sharenotes.com community, I am a big fan of the Onion, which is if you don’t know, a satirical news source not unlike the Daily show. Only it’s web and print stories vs. a television program.

For those of you that are fans, particularly those journalism majors out there who hope to get your own shot at lampooning the President or the world at large, I thought you might be interested in how their fictional stories come to life. I was listening to a replay of “This American Life” which is a tv / radio show that can be found on the web that’s about odd and interesting stories of.. well of American lives. The topic of one of their pieces was “A Tough Room” in which they highlighted the creative process of the Onion’s writing staff.

Basically the all the writers gather in a room and pitch their story ideas simply by reading the fictional headlines aloud. Based solely on the merits of headline alone, either the story lives or dies. When it dies, it DIES. I heard audio clips of people reading their headlines and in many instances, there was complete and utter silence. You could hear a pin drop. And so they would read their next one and so on and so forth until they hit one that would garner some laughter. As you can imagine this would be tough on anyone, but it’s a comedian’s worst nightmare.

In order for a story to survive, a headline has to be voted for by at least 2 of the other writers. The whittling down process happens over the course of a few days and eventually the piece is green lit. Only then is it actually written and displayed for all of us to see. Of course the Editors could then still veto your piece!

I thought it interesting to see how tough a tough room could actually be. In many instances as students we are placed in positions that we are not entirely comfortable with. All of us on sharenotes.com have experienced this as some time or another. Take a creative writing class and read your poetry aloud. Terrifying! Give a speech, or a presentation. Or worse yet, a presentation and speech,… in Spanish. In all of our circumstances most likely our peers aren’t being a brutally honest as perhaps the onion writers are being with one another.

Moving forward as I am once again asked to participate in a scholastic social interaction with with I am uncommfortable, I’ll think about the suffering the Onion writers go through weekly just to get their pieces read.